In what comes as a major outage for the tech giant, most Google services — including Gmail and YouTube — stopped working on Monday (December 14) evening.
As on the time of writing, Google is yet to officially respond, however, the status page for its services seems to have acknowledged the issue.
However, in a mildly flabbergasting search result, users were greeted by a prompt reaction from Google if they made a Google search with the query "Is Google down?" on the search engine.
Google promptly replies with a curt "No" in response to the query "Is Google down?"
The list of services affected by the widespread outage seems to be, according to the status page for its services — YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Classroom, Google Docs, and YouTube TV, among other services.
The other major services affected are Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Sites, Google Groups, Google Hangouts, Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Vault, Currents, Google Keep, Google Tasks, Google Voice, and Google Cloud Search.
According to website health tracker Downdetector, users around the world are experiencing the problem, which peaked around 5 PM.
As one could not ask Google what's wrong, netizens turned to Twitter to check if there was a major outage.
At the time of this writing, Google has reportedly restored access to YouTube through normal browser means, but the incognito mode remains a quick fix in case the issues persist for some users.
For the uninitiated, one can access the 'private' or 'incognito' mode on Google Chrome or other major browsers with the shortcut 'Ctrl + Shift + N'.
Browse to www.youtube.in from the incognito mode, and chances are that the issue will be sorted.
