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Google Blinks on a Friday Morning Rush Hour

Technews

Google Blinks on a Friday Morning Rush Hour

By Art Samaniego

By Robert "Bob" Reyes

Just as when most people are starting their days for homeschooling and work-from-home, some of Google’s services went down for almost an hour causing unnecessary panic to some of their users during the morning “rush hour.”

It was around 9:00 AM (PST - Philippine Standard Time) when my son, who was attending the online part of his homeschooling earlier today, went down rushing from his room asking if there was a problem with our internet connection (as more people had been made aware of some ISPs submarine cable maintenance). According to him, he and his classmates are unable to access the Google Drive shared by their teacher for an activity.

Me, myself, found it difficult to join a Google Meet call at around 9:06 AM. I was stuck at this screen for around three (03) minutes before receiving an error asking me to try again after a few minutes:

“We're aware of a problem affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Google services but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior,” as posted on the G Suite Status Dashboard at around 9:30 AM (PST).

Screenshot of the Google outage from downdetector.com

Among the services affected by this outage were Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Groups, Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Drive, Play Store, Stadia, and even Nest.

It may be recalled, just over a month ago -- 20 August 2020 -- the search giant suffered from a longer outage (around 6 hours) affecting most of the their services relied upon by homeschoolers and work-from-home professionals.

How’s your Friday so far?

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