Sharjah24 – AFP: A massive blackout on Monday temporarily disrupted popular Google services such as Gmail and YouTube, derailing the remote learning, work and entertainment that people have come to rely on during the pandemic.
The outage began shortly before 4:00 am Pacific time (1200 GMT) and lasted about 45 minutes, according to the Silicon Valley-based internet giant.
Services that require users to log in to accounts such as video-sharing platform YouTube or email service Gmail had "higher error rates" than usual resulting in people being denied access, Google said in response to an AFP inquiry.
"We apologize to all who have been affected and will conduct a thorough follow-up to ensure this problem does not recur in the future," a Google spokesperson said after the services were working normally again.
The outage was quickly reported by Internet users around the world, according to the specialist site Downdetector.
Google indicated on its dashboard during the outage that it involved services for "the majority of users."
Hitting in the middle of the European workday, the issues frustrated users who took to social media to air their grievances.
Hashtags including #googledown and #YouTubeDOWN were trending as hundreds of millions of internet users tried vainly to connect to the US search engine.
Messages fired off included one saying Google was slow answering queries about the problem because contacts there could not access their Gmail accounts either.
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