Big glitch KOs Google services for 45 minutes

Internet users worldwide received a jarring reminder Monday about just how reliant they are on Google, when the Silicon Valley giant suffered a major outage for about an hour, sending many of its most popular services offline.

At a time when more people are working from home because of the pandemic, Google services including Calendar, Gmail, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube all crashed, halting productivity and sending angry users to Twitter to vent about the loss of services.

Students struggled to sign into virtual classrooms.

As users scrambled to figure out what was going on, Google disclosed the outages on a status dashboard that shares information about its various services.

Downdetector, a website for tracking internet outages, also showed that Google was offline. Google’s search engine continued to work for some people.

But about an hour after the outages began, the services started working again.

Google initially provided limited information about what occurred, and it was not immediately clear how many users were affected by the outage.

Several of Google’s products have more than 1 billion global users, including Android, Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Play, Search and YouTube.

Later, the company attributed the problem to an “authentication system outage” that lasted for about 45 minutes.

“We apologize to everyone affected,” Google said in a statement.

Product outages were once fairly common for growing internet companies. But as Google, Facebook and others have become larger, building complex networks of interconnected data centers around the world, the incidents have become less common.