For around an hour on Monday morning, the most widely used search engine around the world, Google along with other Google services and websites including Youtube, Google Assistant, and Youtube has suffered a global outage. Google has acknowledged the issue and posted notices across its service websites.

As the users couldn’t access their basic services from Google, they took to Twitter. Soon the hashtag “#YouTubeDOWN,” started trending on Twitter.

Google is the dominant search engine throughout the world. And its dominance has caused the flooding of reports from various parts of the world. However, YouTube has worked fine in some parts of the world when visited in incognito mode. Even the workspaces associated with Google including Docs and Meet were also down abruptly.

Reports included complaints on experience issues regarding Google Assistant. Various third-party services rely on Google mostly for their services. Even they were hit by the problem.  However, Google’s search product has functioned as it is and results were shown for the third-party ads.

US, UK, Netherlands, and Japan are the ones amongst whom the issues were experienced.  The abrupt outage which impacted hundreds of thousands of users reported to have started around 5 PM IST on Monday. 40,000 outage cases were reported from around the world in 10minutes after the outage has occurred, according to DownDetector. DownDetector is the website that tracks web outages.  YouTube and Gmail, which majorly depend on Google, were the worst hit amongst all the services.

Google says that its services are online again after a short time. Google has intimated that it has been continuously working on the issue and said that no further updates would be provided on the Google Workspace Status Dashboard.  It also reassured that reliability is its top concern and the improvements are on way. The same message has been circulated on all the other affected web services.

Google Play Store, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Groups, Hangouts, Google Tasks, Google Keep, Google Slides, Google Calendar, and Youtube are among the web services that were impacted by the outage of Google core services. YouTube in a separate acknowledgment said that it is aware of the issues faced by its users and the team has been constantly working on the abrupt problem. It also reassured that the users will be updated as soon as it gets more news.

In just an hour, people tried to jump to other quick solutions. Those included switching to other search engines like Mozilla Firefox. Some users who reportedly tried running Google services on Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge were irked by the abrupt interruptions in Google’s services.

The outage was not limited to web services alone. Apps on smart devices were also hit by the outage and have become temporarily inaccessible. Some users even reported that few games including Pokemon Go stopped working for a while.

Although the actual reason for the abrupt interruption was not yet known, the temporary interruption has disrupted the daily routines of the users associated with web services around the world for a while.