Google G Suite Outage Highlights Need For Backup

A number of Google services including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Meet, Groups, Chat, Keep and Voice experienced service disruptions worldwide Thursday morning.

Disruptions were ongoing and file uploads were failing across Google’s services, including attachments to both personal and G Suite Gmail accounts, according to The Verge. Service monitoring firm Downdetector showed a spike of reports for issues with Gmail and Google Drive.

The company apologized for the outage and said “System reliability is a top priority at Google. We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

Outage Timeline

Google said it was investigating issues with Gmail at 1:29 AM ET after a flurry of user reports on Twitter. At 4:38 AM ET provided official confirmation of a range of issues on the G Suite Status Dashboard:

“Gmail sending issues, Meet recording issues, Creating files issues in Drive, CSV user upload issues in Admin Console, Posting message issues in Google Chat, Sites adding new pages issues, Keep issues, Voice mail issues”

At 5:40 AM ET, Google updated the dashboard, saying:

“Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

Google reported that Gmail issues had been resolved as of 7:10AM ET and the dashboard was updated to show that all services were functioning normally.

Why You Need SaaS Backup

When discussing SaaS backup, we often talk about the need to protect against accidental or malicious deletion and ransomware attacks. That’s because these are the most common data loss scenarios when using SaaS applications like Google G Suite.

However, outages are another important consideration. While a third-party SaaS backup solution can’t solve email send/receive issues, it does ensure that users have access to their documents during an outage—so businesses remain productive.

Backupify for G Suite data safe and accessible with 3x daily backups and flexible restores. To learn how Backupify enables access to business data during SaaS provider outages, schedule a demo.