Google's Gmail, Drive, Docs and Meet were down: What the company has to say

Multiple Google services, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Meet, experienced a partial outage that affected thousands of users globally. The outage, which was widely reported, showed a spike in reports on outage tracking site DownDetector around 9 pm IST. While not all Google services are affected in the same way, the impact is evident on platforms like Nest devices, and many users are reporting issues via social media. Additionally, other products partially or fully powered by Google Cloud, such as Zoom, Shopify, Spotify, and Pokémon Go, also appeared to be experiencing related outages. Google quickly acknowledged the outage. Soon after, the company also released a statement claiming that it had fixed the issue and what had caused it.

What Google said about the latest outage

In its Workspace Status Dashboard, Google acknowledged the outage and wrote: “Various Workspace services are experiencing elevated latency and error rates.”Soon after, the company updated the page saying: “The issue has been mitigated for all affected users as of 2025-07-18 08:56 US/Pacific. A subset of workspace customers experienced elevated latency and error rates using workspace services. Our initial investigation points to a hardware infrastructure failure as the likely cause. Engineers have mitigated the workspace impact by routing the traffic away from the affected hardware infrastructure. We thank you for your patience while we're working on resolving the issue.”

How the Google outage affected usersAccording to Downdetector, nearly 4,800 users in the US reported facing issues with Google’s services during the outage’s peak time. 47% users reported problems with logging into various services offered by the company, while 41% noted issues with the websites of these services. Meanwhile, 13% users also claimed to face troubles with Google Drive. The global outage affected key cities and business hubs more severely. Major disruptions were reported in the US (New York, LA, Chicago), India (Delhi, Bengaluru), the UK (London), Canada (Toronto), and Australia (Sydney). Users also took to social media platforms to report the issues they were facing with Google's services.Smaller towns and rural areas reportedly saw issues like slow loading and Meet lag, though to a lesser degree. The outage mainly hit business hubs, remote teams, and schools hardest, while some regions like Southeast Asia and Africa saw minimal impact, possibly due to effective server load management.