Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service

Prolonged outage in Europe and beyond dampens productivity

If you struggled to get into your Gmail this morning, it wasn't just you. Unhappy users from Europe all the way to South Africa reported a significant outage.

The issues kicked off at around 8.30 UTC and left some users flummoxed, with many taking to the anger echo chamber that is Twitter.

Gmail email outage, had issues sending emails,sitting in my outbox as queued and not sending at all.

— Karen Dean (@karensugarlips) November 12, 2021

It seemed to particularly affect the Mountain View mammoth's IMAP and SMTP servers, so people using a separate email client to get at their Gmail had a harder time.

According to Google's own status page, the problem also affected Google's Calendar, Groups, and Meet services ­– as well as Talk, sorry, Chat, if anyone still cares.

It seems the big G itself no longer cares about Allo – it's not on the status page. Hangouts is apparently fine, which will be a relief for all three users.

As of about 11am UTC, Google said the problems had been resolved.

We have asked the company to comment on the technical gremlins behind today's wobble. A spokesperson sent us a statement:

“We are aware of a service disruption to some Google Cloud services, including Google Workspace, causing access issues. This disruption began Friday, November 12 around 08:30 am UTC. We have addressed the initial issue and restored access for most users. We are still monitoring the situation. Updates can be tracked on our status dashboards for Google Cloud and Google Workspace.” ®