Outage to Google Services Affect Select Users
April 17, 2013
By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor
Gmail, Google (News - Alert) Drive (a cloud storage service), and several other applications from Google were out of order for a small number of users on Wednesday.
Six of Google’s 13 applications were affected by the limited outage, according to Google’s Apps Status Dashboard.
Other services hit by the outage were Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets and Google Presentations.
Also, TechCrunch said Google Chat on third-party applications and Google Analytics may have seen limited outages as well, based on reports from users.
Google was investigating what caused the outage as of mid-day Wednesday, according to The Washington Post. Users apparently got their service back relatively soon – before the end of the morning (ET).
Based on Google Apps Status Dashboard, the Admin control panel and API faced outages at 8:20 a.m. Next was Gmail at 8:58, Google Drive at 9:01, Google Documents at 9:11, and then Google Spreadsheets and Google Presentations at 9:12.
Users were told during the outage, “Sorry, there seems to be a problem,” The Next Web reported. “The service you’re looking for is temporarily unavailable. We’re working hard to restore your access as soon as possible. Please try again in a few hours. Thanks for your patience.”
Google said it will post a reason for the outage when it is known. “We are currently investigating issues with Gmail, Drive and Docs as well as the Google Apps Control Panel,” Google added in a statement. “We are providing more information and frequent updates through our Google Apps Status Dashboard.”
The outage affected “less than 0.007” percent of Gmail users. Gmail had 425 million active users during 2012.
"For everyone who is affected, we apologize – we know you count on Google to work for you and we're working hard to restore normal operation for you," Google was quoted by Reuters.
Edited by Braden Becker