Is Gmail Down? Users Reporting Issues as Facebook Crash Continues

Gmail is now experiencing issues, with users reporting problems accessing their emails. Is Gmail down? The issues were reported hours after a massive outage affected Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Twitter also is experiencing issues with slow load times, likely caused by the influx of users to the platform after the other services went down.

Thousands of Users Reported Issues with Gmail

Thousands of users are reporting issues with Gmail. However, the numbers are much lower than were seen when Facebook and Instagram first went down.

Here’s DownDetector’s chart for Gmail. The report was initially in the thousands and dropped in just a few minutes.

DownDetector

You can compare the Gmail chart to DownDetector’s chart for Facebook when that service went down hours earlier on Monday, October 4.

Down Detector

Gmail’s issues appear to be more limited at this time and not nearly as widespread.

Gmail users are reporting that 56% of the issues are with the website, according to DownDetector, and 26% are with the server connection, and 18% are with receiving emails.

One person wrote that they couldn’t access their emails at all. However, the problem appears to be intermittent.

Google’s Cloud Status Dashboard Noted Issues Today with a Subset of Google App Engine Customers

Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard reported no issues on October 4.

However, Google’s Cloud Status Dashboard did have a notice posted about an issue, although all the specific services had green checks next to them indicating that everything was working fine.

Google Cloud Status

Google’s Cloud Status service wrote: “Global: Issue impacting a subset of Google App Engine customers due to the “Let’s Encrypt” certification expiration. Mitigation work by our engineering team is currently still in progress. We do not have an ETA for mitigation at this point. Impacted customers may be experiencing build failures and receive an error message related to ‘certificate verification failed’ or ‘SSL connection could not be established’. We will provide more information by Monday, 2021-10-04 17:00 US/Pacific.”

When the issues started, Gmail began trending on Twitter.

Issues were also reported with Snapchat as people moved there for communication with other social media sites slowing down. However, Snapchat’s errors were much lower, below 300 users, according to DownDetector.

One person joked that now is the time to return to MySpace.

Another person on Twitter pointed out that Reddit wasn’t having issues.

DownDetector reported a spike in issues for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp just before 12 p.m. Eastern on Monday, October 4. Hours later and the issues are still ongoing and it’s not clear when they will be resolved. As a result, many services are experiencing their own slowdowns from people flocking to other platforms to discuss what’s happening.

The CTO of Cloudflare tweeted about the outage, writing: “About five minutes before Facebook’s DNS stopped working we saw a large number of BGP changes (mostly route withdrawals) for Facebook’s ASN.”

On Twitter, New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel tweeted that some Facebook employees couldn’t even enter their building this morning because the outage was so bad that their badges stopped working.

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