Popular video conferencing service Google Meet suffered a major service outage for several users in India on Wednesday. At 12:20 pm, outage monitoring platform Downdetector had noted at least 1,455 reports, mostly related to joining online meetings. The outage is a big blow to many remote workers and institutions, as many were forced to report connection failures and issues with the company’s servers, mainly when trying to join sessions via the Google Meet website.
Users Vent Frustration On Social Media
The sudden outage set off a storm of activity on social media platform X, with many users sharing their frustrations, some with dark humour at their sudden freedom from work.
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Jokes and Confusion: One user joked, “google meet crashed before my will to work did,” while another noted the instability of service: “Google meet is down!! Why every big tech is going down this month?”
The problem was organisational in nature, according to reports. As one user posted, “Google meet is down for everyone in my org but not for me.” Another user noticed the partial nature of the problem: “I can join the meet but my rest of the team is facing issues.”
History Of Outages And Infrastructure Concerns
This latest disruption in India added to a history of service issues with Google Meet, including a major outage earlier this year in the US.
Previous US Outage: In September, Google Meet stopped working for over 15,000 users in the United States. Google later attributed that incident to a “recent change in content edge cache” that required its engineers to reverse the change to resolve the problem.
Greater Tech Instability: The Google Meet issues come just one week since an outage at the web-infrastructure firm Cloudflare took down several prominent global websites, including X, Canva, and ChatGPT. Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer, Dane Knecht, acknowledged the failure at the time, stating the company “failed” their customers “and the broader Internet.”
As of mid-afternoon, users were advised to monitor official channels for confirmation of service restoration across the affected areas.
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