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I was trying to send an email and kept getting "Oops there was a problem" errors, but it appears to be working now.
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It isn't just gmail, Google Music, Google Play, Google Drive, and others are also impacted. Seems to be a large scale Google outage of some kind.
Maybe unrelated but a large portion of the Google Cloud web Console was down yesterday for hours.
Add YouTube to the list.
Youtube was giving me 500s in ways that have never occurred before.
YouTube seems to be in this amazing degraded state for me where videos play just fine, but it isn't showing me ads.
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That state is called “using ublock”.
I was in the complete messed up scenario. Youtube loads ads fine, but after playing them, was not able to load the actual content.
Hah I had the opposite. All my ads were playing fine but not the actual videos.
Google photos is absolutely struggling to load my jpegs right now, though I'm not sure how separate that service is from Drive, if at all.
I would bet they're both using the same storage layer (Google Cloud Storage?)
I also have problems with firebase virtual device testing service and google play console api sice yesterday. I keep getting 500 as response, dont know if related though.
No issues here in the Midwest.
Same, at least not yet. Chicago area here. It does seem slower than usual, but might just be my imagination.
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All Ok in Sydney
same - I'm in Sydney - no issues (so far).

Perhaps it's user based, rather than location based?

Seems to be. I'm on the same network as others not having any issues.
Half of my colleagues had issues in Sydney. OK in Singapore apart from images attaching to docs in drive
Can confirm wrt Drive. I was just at work trying to upload files (and one-deep folders) and barely anything completed. I finally gave up.

Our edge/gateway is in metro SEA, fwiw.

Definitely having problems in Melbourne, Australia
In Adelaide also. Things I'm experiencing:

  can't reliably download attachments in Gmail
  messages not getting through in Hangouts
  constant "Oops" auto-save modals when typing Gmail messages
Brisbane too - Google Photos would sync about the time you wrote this comment.
GMail's working fine for me (8min later) in Melbourne, Australia.
Having problems in Budapest, Hungary.
What's the tech scene in Budapest like ?
He told you already, Hungry.
it's funny, not sure why you are downvoted
Google seems to acknowledge the reports now. https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status
https://status.cloud.google.com/

https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/appengine/19007

" Elevated error rate with Google App Engine Blobstore API and App Engine Version Deployment

Incident began at 2019-03-12 19:49 (all times are US/Pacific).

Mitigation work is currently underway by our Engineering Team. We will provide another status update by Tuesday, 2019-03-12 20:45 US/Pacific with current details. "

Status page is down for me.
These are the not that well designed scenarios, when the status pages are hosted on the very same infrastructure that suffers an outage. This is a common pattern across cloud providers I have seen happen.
That page is not very color blind friendly, incidentally. The information is distinguished only by color.
Aren’t the icons all different?
No, they're all circles but in different colors.

EDIT: you might be looking at the Google Cloud status, not the Google services status in the first post.

Not for me - 'available' is a checkmark, 'service disruption' is an exclamation point, and 'unavailable' is an x.

(I notice though that they're images, not text icons, which isn't ideal.)

Weird. Clearly Google is serving up different versions to different people.

To me they're 3 different colors of circles, no symbols whatsoever.

You might be talking about the page in the first reply? Not in the post that someone was responding to?

I see all mid-toned circles with no icons (Chrome, Australia).

The orange dots are much darker and the green ones are much lighter.

I'd assume anyone who is colorblind can still distinguish between the two based on brightness and not color?

Is there any reason to think that's not the case?

If the user had e.g. red/green colorblindness, that wouldn't help. Google's made a nice tradeoff for this application, though, and used differently-shaped icons (checkmark vs. exclamation point) as well.

Edit: looks like the icons are served as images. Google should probably consider making them text icons instead to mitigate loading problems.

FYI, Toptal makes a helpful tool for quickly checking live pages with colorblindness filters: https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter/

Heck, I'm not colorblind and I had trouble seeing the difference between "service disruption" and "service outage" at first in the legend at the bottom of the page.

It wasn't until I zoomed in on them that I could see that one was orange and the other red. Once I saw them zoomed, I could then identify which was which at normal size on the status part of the page.

BTW, the orange circle is actually a span whose class is "aad-yellow-circle", and whose CSS loads the colored circle from the file yellow_circle.png.

This suggests that at one time they intended it to be a yellow circle, not an orange circle [1]. I wonder why they switched from yellow to orange?

[1] Actually, RGB to name sites suggest that it is neon carrot.

Hit that feedback button in the bottom corner.
You're kidding, right? Sending feedback to Google? I mean isn't that a bit like talking to a tortoise?
In general, maybe, but they take accessibility concerns very seriously in my experience.
Colorblindness is the veganism of the web.
?!? because people choose to be colorblind? I was not aware of this!
there's no such thing as free will so choice is a red herring anywa. You are what you are, whether you 'chose' to be is pointless to talk about.
Cute way of getting out of having to own the fact that you’re an asshole.
I mean, playing board games is kind of a bitch sometimes as well. I was trying to play Ticket to Ride on Monday and that was exciting.

Good thing I chose this in the same way people choose not to eat certain foods, right?

Propose solutions.
Honestly, it's not hard. Just don't design everything around color. On ticket to ride, the grey lines ones have a dot or shape in the middle whereas the black ones do not. I can see that dot, but it's small. If it was larger then the problem would be solved.
Noticed this a few minutes ago. It’s pretty rare for Google to have an outage, don’t they have massive replication and failover?
Youtube was down for a few hours late last year.
Fine here in CA.
I'm in Mountain View, receiving/sending email works but downloading full size attachments does not for me personally.
I just emailed some folks images. Got a few warnings of something going wrong, so I then checked in my outbox. It showed that the images went, but there was a message that the "virus scanners were down, download at your own risk." Or some such. Seems to be back to working now, so I just assumed it was a time delay.

Edit: Just saw it again. Full message is: Gmail virus scanners are temporarily unavailable – The attached files haven't been scanned for viruses. Download these files at your own risk.

First time I've seen something like this, actually kind of glad they had this failure case coded for. :)

I've been seeing that for the last couple of weeks, off and on.
My guess is there is always a time delay of some sort on files. The transient "something went wrong" errors were surprising.
That error happens all the time on files it can't handle; i think .tgz type files come to mind.
Also Mountain View, but had issues sending/receiving as wells. I'm on Comcast, you?
I am using both a T-Mobile hotspot and Sonic.net DSL.
drive, maps, photos all having issues as well
I'm getting a ton of 503 Service Unavailable errors from the Google Drive API. I can't wait to see what caused such a large outage.
Can't attach files to drafts nor send emails from Philippines
Hopefully it never comes back up

Edit: Because then maybe people will realize that centralization is bad

Why the negativity. Mistakes happen ?
Maybe think of it more as an opportunity to remember how we've let ourselves be lulled by this behemoth. Google itself is pretty much a spof for most of the world. If Google is down, so is business.

Of course, the report afterwards will be very interesting, while we pick apart the reasons on what and how it failed.

There are enough email alternatives.
Probably just a Google employee waking up and becoming sentient again, running around pulling out as many cables as possible to save humanity. It should be up and running again when they catch and reset him.
I am not affected by this outage but I get a bit angry when I think about how many people are. In a better world it would affect much fewer people.
Because it's largely unnecessary. If people were more willing to push for decentralized alternatives then world-wide outages would be a thing of the past, short of the entire internet itself going down in which case you probably have bigger problems to worry about that loss of access to [x].

In my opinion it's not a question of if, but when we'll have our first disgruntled higher level employee manage to effectively destroy massive amounts of information and redundancies. As people become more and more dependent upon centralized services, the impact of this first 'digital nuke' will only continue to grow.

In some ways the internet feels like we have created a machine that can take us anywhere in the universe, but we've decided that instead we'll use it to take us strictly between New York and LA - occasionally with some 'wild' idea to take us to London.

The root of this is definitely GCS. We noticed some keys in a GCS bucket go inaccessible since like 19:15-19:20ish PDT, and then we noticed increased timeouts/503's ramping up at 19:30 and plateauing at 19:45. But error rate for us seems to have gone back to nominal levels since 20:10... but the keys that originally went unavailable are still returning 503's.

Fun times.

GCS might be relying on the same system as Gmail/YouTube does, so it’s not necessarily GCS itself. Spanner?
It will be very interesting to see what timing issues might be involved if this is indeed due to Spanner.
If Google's GCP marketing material is to be believed, you are truly on their infrastructure on GCP, so if GCP is having issues so are Google's main services.
I had trouble replying to an email but it worked once I removed the images inside the quoted signature. Makes me think this is file-related.
Working fine in Austin TX