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The company says all services have been restored.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Mondays working from home are stressful enough, but an outage affecting several Google services, including Gmail, created more problems for people working from their home office.
The company said online that at around 6:55 a.m. Eastern Time, an issue prevented the majority of users from accessing services such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Meet. The online video platform YouTube was also affected.
A Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement that at approximately 6:47 a.m. Eastern Time, Google experienced an authentication system malfunction for approximately 45 minutes due to “a problem with internal storage.” That caused problems for services that required users to log in. The spokesperson said the issue with the authentication system was resolved at 7:32 a.m. Eastern Time.
“All services have now been restored,” the spokesperson added. “We apologize to all concerned and we will conduct a thorough follow-up review to ensure that this issue does not recur in the future.”
With millions of users stuck at home connecting to colleagues and customers online, such outages have a greater impact on the workday. Last month, a outage disrupted many major online businesses using Amazon Web Services, including Roku.
Yet such protracted outages are in part newsworthy because they do not occur often. Gmail and related services have proven to be quite reliable during the pandemic.
Shares of Alphabet (ticker: GOOGL) were up 0.2% at around 10 a.m. Monday morning, implying investors haven’t made much of it. The S&P 500 index rose 0.9%.
Write to Connor Smith at [email protected]