Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Google and Gmail just experienced their second big outage in a week

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Google (GOOGL) users in the U.K. experienced difficulty using Chrome, Gmail, and YouTube for two hours on Monday morning.

The outage comes less than one week after Gmail experienced a global outage. Gmail and Google Drive were inaccessible for four hours on August 8.

“We are experiencing an issue with Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, Hybrid Connectivity,” Google told Evening Standard. “The issue is mitigated and our engineering team continues to investigate the issue and are monitoring for the residual impact.”

The internet has been troubled by outages and glitches in recent months. In mid-July, cybersecurity software giant CrowdStrike caused a worldwide IT outage that impacted flights, business operations, and emergency services. The disruption reportedly cost each Fortune 500 company using the software at least $44 million.

Separately, a glitch on Google Cloud led to the accidental erasure of a $125 billion Australian pension fund in April.

Experts say IT outages are occurring more frequently. Brennen Smith, vice president of technology at connectivity intelligence company Ookla, told the BBC in April that the company is seeing more outages that impact greater numbers of users. “The internet is not exactly getting more stable,” he said.

Smith told the BBC that adding more complexity to online platforms create more opportunities for things to go wrong. “Right now there’s a push for these mega giants to incorporate very game-changing new technology into their products and services,” he said. “I think with the push for innovation now, we’re going to start to see tech companies move faster [but] it comes at the risk of potentially breaking things.”

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