Gmail resumes services after millions face outage globally

“Downdetector only reports an incident when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than the typical volume for that time of day,” the reporting site mentioned.

In a status update, Google said that email delivery had been fixed by its engineers, however, the delivery of backlog emails could take a few hours. “Mitigation is currently underway and email delivery is no longer failing, however Google engineering team is now working through the backlog of undelivered messages and expect all messages to be delivered in the next few hours,” Google said in its workspace status dashboard.

The problem seemed multifaceted as several users complained about the service not responding while others said that their emails were not getting delivered. Some said that while the emails they sent were shown as delivered, the recipient had not received them.

At the time of publishing, the actual reason behind the outage was not clear. Queries sent to Google remained unanswered.

Previously, Meta’s WhatsApp had gone down in the month of October causing mass disruption, given the sheer number of users on the platform. This was the second outage of the chat platform since the service went down as part of a massive outage that also took down Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, and Facebook last year. Meta, known as Facebook at the time, said that the outage was due to a configuration change to its routers.

In June last year, several news, e-commerce, social media, and government websites went offline due to a major global outage at the content delivery network (CDN) provider Fastly’s end.

Some of the leading global media outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, Vice, the Guardian, CNN, and BuzzFeed News were rendered inaccessible. E-commerce platforms like Amazon.com, social media sites like Reddit and even government websites like the UK government’s were also impacted.