Google is having a serious case of the Mondays. Google Hangouts, G-Chat and several other services crashed on Monday afternoon and stayed down. Maybe it was because Monday was St. Patrick's Day- and well, we all know what typically happens on St. Patty's day! - but then again, maybe that wasn't it. Google has been having quite a few major issues recently.
Just a few months ago in January, Google experienced a massive Gmail outage, which had a huge ripple effect. Since Gmail and Google+ were down, G-Chat, Hangouts and the YouTube comments were also out for the count. The Gmail crisis was reported by users the world over, from Europe and the United States, to Canada, India and more. The outage lasted around 50 minutes, which is quite a long time for a tech issue. Google quickly apologized for the inconvenience and assured users that new systems would be put in place to help prevent another prolonged outage in the future.
"Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies," said Ben Treynor, Google's VP of Engineering, in a blog post. "We strive to make all of Google's services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today. The issue has been resolved, and we're now focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage, as well as putting more checks and monitors in place to ensure that this kind of problem doesn't happen again."
A similar problem occurred again in February, when Google Drive and productivity apps went down for more than 5 hours.
Prior to these huge failures, Google's reputation was nearly spotless, with only a few minor problems here and there. But on Monday, a similar outage of Hangouts, G-Chat, Voice, Spreadsheet and a few other Google apps caused yet another uproar. Users were unable to send or receive messages in any of Google's chat web apps or mobile apps for at least 30 minutes. The outage started around 12:30 p.m. EST and continued late into the day. Google promptly stated on its App Dashboard that Google Talk, Hangouts and G-Chat were all experiencing "service disruption," but not a complete "service outage," which is the worst classification.
Google quickly fixed problems with Drive, Spreadsheets and other services, but G-Chat and Hangouts remained problematic. Around 2 p.m. EST, it seemed that Google had resolved the issue, but then the services went back on the fritz shortly thereafter. By 3 p.m. EST, the mobile Hangouts apps seemed to be working normally, but Hangouts on the Google+ web page continued to fail. Hangouts repeatedly asked to be reconnected to the server. Similar problems occurred on G-Chat from the Gmail web page, but the chat app functioned slightly better from that web page.
Users of Google's popular chat apps took to Twitter to express their angst. Some joked that G-Chat was drunk because of St. Patty's day, others cursed Google's bad timing and complained of receiving too many emails.
Google finally restored full service to Hangouts and G-Chat around 3:28 p.m. EST. On its App Status Dashboard, Google assured users that things were back to normal.
"The problem with Google+ Hangouts should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," Google said.
It is unknown why Google is suffering from so many huge outages of late, but it certainly isn't helping the company any. Google is well-loved almost universally simply because it does not have these problems very often. For better or worse, we tend to hold Google to a higher standard than we do a lot of other companies, so any issue, no matter how brief, seems like a catastrophe.
