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The company claims that all services have been restored.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Mondays working from home pay enough taxes, but an outage affecting several Google services, including Gmail, added more problems to people operating from home offices.
The company said online that around 6:55 a.m. Eastern time, a problem left most users unable to access services like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Meet. The online video platform YouTube was also affected.
A Google spokesman said in an email statement that around 6:47 a.m., Eastern Time, Google experienced an interruption to the authentication system for about 45 minutes due to “a quota problem internal storage ”. This caused problems in services that require users to sign in. The spokesman said the authentication system problem was resolved at 7:32 am, Eastern Time.
“Now all services have been restored,” the spokesman added. “We apologize to all those affected and will conduct a thorough review of the follow-up to ensure that this issue cannot be repeated in the future.”
With millions of users trapped at home, connected to co-workers and online customers, these interruptions have had a more intense impact on the workday. Last month, an outage disrupted a large number of large online businesses that used Amazon Web Services, including Roku.
Still, these prolonged interruptions are news in part because they don’t happen very often. Gmail and related services have proven to be quite reliable in the midst of the pandemic.
Shares of Alphabet (ticker: GOOGL) rose 0.2% around 10 a.m. Monday, implying that investors didn’t do much. The S&P 500 index rose 0.9%.
Write to Connor Smith at [email protected]