Gmail and YouTube Experience Outage Following Restoration of Instagram and Facebook
Late Tuesday, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook and other services struggled with prolonged outages that affected a significant user base. Meta recognized the problems and successfully solved them. Meanwhile, Google, another tech giant, also faced brief disruptions.
While Facebook users encountered error messages and unintentionally logged out and were unable to log back in, Instagram users found themselves stuck in their feeds and unable to update and access new content. Soon after the normalization of Instagram and Facebook, problems started to appear in Google’s services.
According to outage tracking website Downdetector, Google services including YouTube and Gmail started experiencing similar issues around 9:00 PM IST. However, unlike Meta’s widespread outage, Google received only a limited number of outage reports. Downdetector observed a decrease in problem reports between 10:30 and 23:00.
The outage was officially confirmed, and YouTube acknowledged it on March 5 at 9:58 p.m., stating, “Thanks to everyone who sent in notes about YouTube loading issues: we’re on it!” In a subsequent message around 12:30 p.m., YouTube offered an update, saying, “Quick update everyone: this has now been fixed. Let us know if you’re still having problems uploading!”
Google also confirmed that Gmail is back to normal and attributed the downtime to increased traffic. “We saw an increase in traffic around 7:25 a.m. PT on March 5, and scaled our systems to accommodate the additional load,” Google said.
