Today, on Monday, Aug. 19, 2019, Google shared with its users publicly at 2:53 p.m. Eastern Time that it was looking into a number of reports submitted by Gmail users to Down Detector and Outage Report, a pair of popular websites that Internet users check to see if their favorite websites are down, or whether their particular setups are the only ones causing them issues.
According to Down Detector, the first issues with Gmail sprung up around 10:13 a.m. Eastern Time. Google’s issues started around 2:09 p.m. Eastern Time, according to user reports on Down Detector. At the time that Google shared news of its initial investigation into the reported issues, upward of 4,000 user reports had been submitted to Down Detector and Outage Report in total.
The majority of users who reported having issues with the tech giant’s email platform claimed that they couldn’t log in to their accounts – neither their Google nor Gmail accounts, as a matter of fact. Most of these users were based in the United States, per Down Detector, Outage Report, other similar websites, social media platforms, and automated web-based tools that prowl the Internet for potential issues with website outages.
American users who were having problems with logging into their accounts seemed to be concentrated in the cities of New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston.
About an hour after Google’s initial public message, the tech giant announced via its dashboard that issues with Gmail should largely be resolved. This update came at about 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time today, Monday, Aug. 19. At this point, Google tech gurus indicated that they wouldn’t be updating the dashboard or any other means of communication with provisions of service for its users.
After the United States, users in the United Kingdom, particularly around the city of London, were most affected. Users across eastern Brazil and northern Europe were also affected by the problems that Google seemed to be having today.
Unfortunately for Google, these issues aren’t the only ones that the tech giant has faced this year. In March 2019, both Google and Google Drive failed for thousands of users across the world.
Apple also experienced a problem with its provision of iCloud services to users, causing people to have problems with apps like Mail, Contacts, and Find My iPhone.
Back in May of this year, Facebook and its social media platform subsidiaries – namely WhatsApp and Instagram – faced issues, leaving many users unable to log in for longer than eight hours. Facebook claimed that this issue arose directly from its changing of its existing server configuration.
