Google is down – Don’t panic! 

An ongoing issue with Google's servers has brought down many of the company's cloud services, leaving millions of users without access to their data. 

Multiple services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Photos are all currently affected. 

Problems were reported overnight but midday UK time and tracking site DownDetector shows widespread YouTube outage.

YouTube tweeted at around midday: ‘We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now – our team is aware and looking into it. We'll update you here as soon as we have more news.’ 

Outages even of such scale are not new. Google was hit by significant outage in August, which also took down its suite of online services and YouTube. Its products also experienced a smaller outage last month 

But this underlines the common sense in not putting all your eggs in one basket. Don’t upload all you video or stills or work documents to just one provider; don’t use one email provider (like who does that anyway?); and if you’re working with professional video in the cloud maybe events like this will cause you to think twice. 

All the chatter from 2020 reviews and 2021 previews suggest that the pandemic has put a rocket under existing trends to shift wholesale to the cloud but if you’re a media organization hosting rushes in the cloud or playing out from the cloud – whether that’s Google Cloud Platform, AWS or Azure then you’d better have a solid back-up or two. 

Cloud is meant to be the cure-all for business continuity in event of a third wave, another pandemic or some other disaster of global proportions but not if its servers are knocked out of action with this ease. 

It also illustrates quite how much reliance we have on a handful of companies for our daily digital needs.  

There is no word on the cause of Google’s blackout today.