Google faced a massive, as-yet-unexplained outage on Monday morning, with users unable to visit YouTube or Gmail, or use other Google-affiliated products like Google Home and Google Nest.
People are reporting issues in the United States, Canada, Europe, India, Australia, and South America. In other words, it’s a major worldwide outage. Google hasn’t provided any explanation yet, but YouTube acknowledged the problem on Twitter, announcing that “our team is aware and looking into it.” As of 7:45am ET, it seems like Google platforms have mostly returned to normal functionality.
DownDetector, a site that reports technical issues on popular websites, also briefly reported a problem with Discord, but this outage may not have been connected to Google.
This widespread outage highlights how central Google has become to modern internet usage. It also raises concerns about smart home devices like Google Nest. As a result of Google’s technical issues, some people reported real-world glitches like lights being switched off or on because they’re controlled by Google Home.