Google Services, Including Gmail, YouTube Disrupted As Servers Crash

Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG subsidiary Google’s services suffered a disruption Thursday in the United States that spanned Google Meet, Docs, YouTube, and Gmail services, the New York Times reported.

What Happened: The service outage was mainly centered around the East Coast, the Times said — citing Downdetector, an outage detector service.

Downdetector tweeted Thursday that it received reports regarding YouTube, Google Calendar, Hangouts, Gmail, and Google Drive having problems on Thursday around 9 p.m. ET.

Google Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle said on Twitter that Google services “were down for some users from 6:00 to 6:23 p.m. PDT.”

“A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed, and users on that particular pool experienced the outage. GCP [Google Cloud Platform] was not affected,” said Hölzle.

We're very sorry for the outage, we know how critical these services are to everyone's lives. We're working on a postmortem to ensure this won't happen again.

— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) September 25, 2020

Why It Matters: Google’s own status dashboard related to its G Suite services reflected certain "service disruptions" late Thursday, but the issues seemed to have been fixed as of press time.

Outages seemed to have hit Google’s corporate customers who use its cloud computing service, the Times noted.

Widespread outages that affect multiple Google services are reportedly unusual.

Several Google services including Gmail suffered an outage last month around the world including the United States, Japan, India, and Australia. 

Price Action: Alphabet class A shares closed nearly 1% higher at $1,422.86 on Thursday. On the same day, the company’s Class C shares closed nearly 0.9% higher at $1,428.29.