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Google confirms four-hour outage of YouTube, GMail, other major services

Google blamed "high levels of network congestion" in the East for outages that affected YouTube, GMail, Google Voice, Calendar and many other services.
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An employee passes the Google logo in Berlin in January.Carsten Koall / Getty Images file

Google Inc. reported Sunday that YouTube, GMail, Google Calendar and nearly all its of other consumer-facing services experienced major service problems for about four hours after reports of outages flooded in from users around the country.

The company said it experienced "high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube," after web monitoring services began reporting high numbers of connection failures at about 3 p.m. on a host of Google services at about 3 p.m., most of them in the eastern half of the country.

At 7:30 p.m., it said the "issue affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube is resolved for the vast majority of users, and we expect a full resolution in the near future."

In addition to YouTube, GMail and Calendar, affected services included Google Drive and its related editing and presentation tools, like Docs and Sheets; Hangouts; Keep; Tasks; and Voice. Google status pages showed that two of the company's major internal backbone engines, Cloud Service and Compute Engine, also were "reporting issues" during the same time frame.

The reports began surfacing at about the same time that Level 3 Communications, a prominent provider of internet services in 46 states and much of South America, was experiencing similar problems, also primarily in the eastern half of the country.

Level 3's clients include Google, but it couldn't immediately determined whether the two incidents were related.