Google Outage 2021

Is Google Down

Google is experiencing a broad disruption of service for many of its user resources. Several areas had reported complications in reaching Google productivity applications such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Google Classroom today. When attempting to create a new Google Doc, our colleagues had experienced the following error:

Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes.

To learn more about the Google Docs editors, please visit our help center.

We're sorry for the inconvenience.

- The Google Docs Team

The reason for the outage is currently unknown and has not yet been disclosed by Google. Their official status page confirms the applications listed above were in fact experiencing service disruptions. Since the time of the initial reports, the status icons have changed from orange Service Disruption icons to red Service Outage indicators.

Google Status

Popular service outage detector service, Downdetector, showed a spike in reports pertaining to the Google-related connection issue on April 12, 2021 at 9:23 a.m. CST. User reports of the problem started to peak at around 7:30 a.m. CST. Downdetector showed that other services such as Schoology and toggl were experiencing similar disruptions at the same time, which could mean they utilize Google extensions.

A message on Google’s App Status Dashboard said, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Docs. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Google Docs, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior,” reported Variety.

It appears that as of 10:42 a.m. CST services have been restored in some areas, but their status page still indicated that the services were experiencing an outage. We will not know the true cause of this outage until Google releases the details of the issue.

Image and thumbnail source: variety.com