Gmail down: Millions worldwide affected by Google crash

Gmail, Google Docs, Google Meets and other services associated with the tech giant are reported to have broken down on the morning of Thursday 20 August, with millions of frustrated customers trying to get to the bottom of the mystery outage preventing them from getting through their work days. 

Four words that spell disaster for Google users were read across the globe when they tried to log on or send documents this morning – “Oops, something went wrong”. 

Google have yet to resolve the issue, Although they have said that they are investigating to find out why some people are having errors sending file attachments and uploading, and why some people can’t log in at all. 

Gmail down for millions of users across the world 

This is a bad time for Gmail to go down. With the COVID-19 pandemic rendering global business communities housebound, and swift, efficient communication tools desperately required to keep the cogs in the great economic machine turning, the tech giant has become one of the cornerstone companies in the “new normal” the world is currently growing accustomed to.  

The Google Apps status page says they’re investigating the issue and promised to report back to their millions of users with continuous updates throughout the day until the issue is resolved. 

“Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 8/20/20, 10:21 AM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience,” they wrote on their status update page.

They sited “Gmail sending issues, Meet recording issues, Creating files issues in Drive, CSV user upload issues in Admin Console, and Posting message issues in Google Chat” as the core problems they are trying to resolve. 

The South African will keep track of their progress and update this story with updates form Google throughout the morning. 

Google services faltering  

Troubleshooting website DownDetector was inundated with reports of “Gmail down” on Thursday, and they provided an infographic to demonstrate the extent of the fallout accross the world.

Infographic: DownDetector

They were also able to demonstrate the user reports that Gmail is down according to the time in which the first errors started flooding in, at around 6:00 this morning.

Infogrpahic: Downdetector