Google Calendar Suffering From Global Outage
2019 has been a year of numerous outages across various services and applications worldwide. For instance, social media platforms Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram suffered from a worldwide outage in the consecutive months of March and April. Furthermore, American technology company Google also suffered from Google Cloud downtime earlier this month. As per recent reports, Google Calendar is also not functioning currently for multiple users across the globe.
Many users who have been trying to access their Google Calendar schedules at calendar.google.com are facing issues, since they are greeted with an error. First reports started pouring in at about 7:30pm IST (10am EST). The majority of Canadian and US population (in addition to other countries) are unable to navigate to the website since then. The company has confirmed details regarding the service outage via its G Suite Status Dashboard, which can be viewed by clicking here.
Scheduling made simpler with @googlecalendar ? https://t.co/3WXZX2deRE pic.twitter.com/s3E1q8gGsO
— G Suite (@gsuite) June 18, 2019
The company’s statement implied that the problem is being investigated. Additional details are expected to be available shortly. The most interesting aspect of this outage is the fact that the company posted a tweet from the G Suite Twitter handle stating how the Google Calendar application makes scheduling much simpler for day-to-day usage. The tweet was published merely an hour before the service outage. This may be a coincidence or a timed external attack on the company’s servers. Shortly thereafter, the company posted about the service disruption as well.
Google Calendar is currently experiencing a service disruption. Please stay tuned for updates or follow here: https://t.co/2SGW3X1cQn
— G Suite (@gsuite) June 18, 2019
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This incident is another wake up call to a multitude of users across the globe, showcasing how vulnerable online services can be. When a lot of users rely on a single platform for their daily needs, a backup/contingency plan becomes an absolute necessity for conglomerates. An update from Google is expected to be available shortly, with engineers working on the problem, as stated by the company. Google’s other services (including Gmail, Docs and Drive) seem to be entirely unaffected at the moment. Moreover, the mobile application for the same is functioning without any hiccups as well.