Google suffered a major outage for about an hour on Monday when many of its most popular services went offline worldwide, providing a stark reminder of how much people and businesses rely on the Silicon Valley giant.
The tech company’s apps — including Calendar, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Meet, Stadia and YouTube — crashed, halting work across the globe and sending angry users to Twitter to vent about the loss of services.
Google disclosed the outages on a status dashboard that shares information about its various services. Downdetector, a website for tracking internet outages, also showed that Google was offline. Google’s search engine continued to work for some people.
But then about an hour after the outages began, the services started working again.
A Google spokesman had no immediate comment about what was causing the outage.
Product outages were once fairly common for growing internet companies. But as Google, Facebook and others have grown larger, building complex networks of data centers around the world, the incidents have become less common.
The reliability of the systems have become increasingly important as people and businesses depend on the services, whether to search for information online, find directions, send email or get access to private documents stored on Google’s servers.
Several of Google’s products have more than a billion global users, including Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Play, Search and YouTube.
New questions are being raised about whether the biggest technology companies have grown too powerful. The industry is facing antitrust lawsuits in the United States and new regulations in Europe to limit their power and impose fresh oversight.
