Is Google Down? YouTube, Gmail, Calendar Suffer Outages

Update: Service has been restored. In a tweet, the Google Workspace account said: "We're all clear folks! Thanks for staying with us." The Twitter account for Google Cloud said the problems were linked to an "authentication system outage." Original story follows: Several Google services appear to be suffering outages, with widespread issues hitting Gmail, YouTube, Drive and Hangouts. An error on Gmail reads: "We're sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." YouTube is also offline, with a warning that now reads: "Something went wrong..." According to DownDetector, a platform that tracks reports about outages in real-time, the Google software problems appear to be taking place worldwide, but seemed to at first be most prevalent in Europe and along the east coast of America. DownDetector indicates the outages are also impacting Google services Meet, Home, Cloud and Calendar. The Google Play Store, the Android app marketplace, appears to be suffering problems, as does the company's smart home division Nest. Google's official status dashboard has confirmed the service outages are hitting the full range of services. "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users," it said in the alert for its email platform, used by more than a billion people globally. "The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 12:12 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change," Google's statement added. User complaints flooded social media today as G-suite users were disrupted by the outages. The exact source of the problem is unclear at the time of writing. In a statement posted to Twitter, the official YouTube help account wrote: "We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now – our team is aware and looking into it. We'll update you here as soon as we have more news." The Google Communications Twitter account has not yet responded to the blackout, which seems to have left all of the services either inaccessible or unresponsive. "WOAH... Google is suffering MAJOR outage with YouTube, Gmail, and Search down for a LOT of people," tweeted social media commentator Matt Navarra. "The day came. When you can't even google what happened with google. It's still 2020," read a tweet that has quickly attracted hundreds of likes and shares. "Not being able to Google why Google is down is peak 2020!" another Twitter user added.