All Google services including Gmail, Search and Docs were down across the entire United States from 14:09 EST and some media resources claimed that the disruption was due to a cyber attack launched by a foreign nation.
However, in a briefing released a few minutes ago, Google has officially declared that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack, but was due to a technical glitch which affected meager 5% of Gmail accounts.
An update provided by Downdetector says that the service disruption was caused only on the east and west coasts of the United States and in some parts of South America including Brazil, Chile, Santiago, and Argentina. Among the countries in Europe, only Gmail users in London and some parts of Germany & Netherlands were affected.
Google which happens to be a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc said that the services were restored to many by 18:47 GMT and by 19:45 GMT everything was back in place as normal.
Later at 20:19 GMT the company re-issued a statement that some users signing into devices via Chrome browsers are still facing issues.
Coming to the cyber attack speculations, from 16:30 GMT some media resources reported that Google could be down due to a cyber attack. Soon, the news spread like fire on social media platforms and tech communities like Reddit which later proved to be false.
Many parents complained that the outage caused their children to postpone their homework to some other day or some even said that they have lost their mood to focus on studies due to the tech giant’s service disruption…..strange….but true!
