Google is one of the largest entities on the internet. With vast array of services and products, the company is among the most powerful the web has ever seen.
Not only Google's services and products are widely used, as Google itself also contributes to the vastness of the internet by investing on the development of the backbone and the internet's infrastructure.
And by operating many data centers throughout the globe, Google and its properties can ensure that they can stay online no matter what happens.
But this time, Google's failsafe design seems to have failed, as Google Search, YouTube and Gmail were all down simultaneously for many people around the world.
Concentrated mostly in Europe, many people in the region were reporting problems accessing the Google products on both mobile and desktop.
And not just that, as Google Chat, Meet, Calendar and Groups were also affected.
The issue was so large and widespread, that people started complaining on various social media networks, mostly on Twitter.
Reports of the issue started to flood as furious users found they were unable to communicate, work, or watch YouTube.
Google then confirmed that there was an issue, and updated its general status page claiming that: "We are currently investigating an issue affecting user access to multiple services affecting users in Europe."
Problems with the popular platforms began at 8:30am GMT on Friday and lasted for several hours.
In an update, Google explained that the issue stemmed from a fault with Google Cloud, a suite of public cloud computing services offered by Google.
Apparently Google not only ran the cloud service to its customers, as the company itself also ran many of its services through this infrastructure.
Because of that, an issue on the cloud platform inevitably put many Google products and services offline.
"On Friday November 12 around 08:30 am UTC, some of our users experienced a service disruption to Google Cloud services, including Google Workspace. This issue is now resolved. For more details, please see our status dashboards for Google Cloud and Google Workspace."
Google as one of the largest companies to conduct business on the internet is mostly stable and reliable. This is because the company runs its own network that is in turn, runs on a vast amount for resources, with even more to spare.
This is the reason why Google can rarely experience downtime.
But in rare cases when they do experience downtime, Google as a large infrastructure, can struggle to change at scale.
As a result, some of its downtime can last for hours at a time.
In this case, Google has reportedly described the problem as "disruption" instead of an outage, suggesting that the impact of this whole problem to be limited.
While the downtime appears to have most heavily impacted users in the UK, users in countries such as Spain and Kenya also reported problems.
People in the U.S. however, were largely unaffected.
After the issue has been resolved, Google apologized for any inconvenience it has caused.
