Users reported problems for much of Sunday, while questions are growing over whether the outage could involve a cyberattack. No government agency or Google has publicly confirmed an attack.
HOUSTON A widespread outage affecting Google services disrupted internet use Sunday, leaving users unable to reliably access Google Sservices such as Gmail and YouTube, Maps, Keep and more. Problems began appearing at about 2 a.m. Central Time on Sept. 6 and continued into the evening, according to outage reports and users who spoke with Texas News Express. Downdetector reports rose throughout the morning and were about 10 times higher than normal by 9 a.m.
Users reported different problems depending on the service and location. Some said Google Search would not load at all, while others said results appeared slowly or only after several attempts. Gmail users reported login problems and delayed mail. YouTube users reported missing thumbnails and slow-loading pages, while some videos would still play after being selected. YouTube TV users also reported buffering and distorted video. Significant problems were still being reported around 6 p.m. Central Time.
This outage has made accessing some non-Google services that reply on two-factor authentication by sending a OTP to a users email account very difficult. Since Google operates Gmail and Google Workspace, users are having difficulty logging into non-Google sites.
Texas News Express spoke with several Texas businesses and Google users who described similar problems. Some said services worked for a few minutes and then stopped again. Others reported very slow loading times. Several users said Google Maps and Google Keep were also unreliable at times. Google’s official Maps and Workspace status systems, however, had not listed a confirmed widespread outage for those services by Sunday evening.
Reports were not limited to Texas or the United States. User reports connected to Gmail and other Google services also appeared from India and the Philippines, along with Brazil and Australia. Reports were also recorded from parts of Europe, showing that at least some problems were being experienced outside North America.
The outage can affect more than people trying to open Google websites. Many online stores and business websites use Google services in the background for maps, advertising or analytics. Others use Google sign-in tools, security services or cloud systems. Google says its AdSense program alone is used by more than one million websites. That does not mean all of those websites were down Sunday, but it shows how a major Google failure can spread beyond Google’s own products.
Texas News Express asked Google for a comment and Google said they do not wish to comment at this time.
Texas News Express received information attributed to GoDaddy estimating that about one million websites using some form of Google data or service were experiencing problems connected to the outage. Texas News Express had not located a public GoDaddy statement confirming that exact number by publication time. The wider effect is still possible because millions of websites use Google products, but the one-million figure should be considered preliminary unless GoDaddy publicly confirms it.
One unusual part of Sunday’s outage is the difference between user reports and Google’s official dashboards. Google’s Search Status Dashboard continued to show no incident late Sunday afternoon. Google Cloud also reported no broad severe incident across its American regions earlier in the day. The Google Maps Platform dashboard did not show a major Sept. 6 failure either.
That difference does not prove that nothing was wrong. Official company dashboards sometimes track specific systems differently from consumer outage websites. It may also mean the problem affected connections or systems that were not represented as a full platform outage. Google had not publicly identified a cause for the widespread user problems by the time this article was prepared.
The possibility of a cyberattack is also being examined, according to information provided to Texas News Express. A source identified by Texas News Express as being familiar with preliminary FBI discussions said investigators were looking at whether Iran may have been involved, possibly with assistance from North Korea. The FBI has not publicly confirmed that assessment, and Texas News Express has not independently verified evidence tying either country to the outage. The FBI’s public cyber news and alert pages contained no statement Sunday blaming Iran, North Korea or any other actor.
That distinction is important because large technology outages can have many causes. Software failures and networking problems can produce effects that look similar to a cyberattack. Hardware failures can also knock large systems offline. Google experienced earlier outages caused by infrastructure failures, including a June disruption in India after a fire at a third-party data center.
Cybersecurity concerns are higher than usual because American companies are facing an increase in sophisticated cyberattacks. Reuters recently reported that businesses worldwide are dealing with growing numbers of ransomware attacks and AI-assisted cyber threats. That makes a cyberattack a reasonable possibility for investigators to examine, but it does not establish that Sunday’s Google problems were caused by hackers.
Google Pay also drew some user complaints Sunday, although Google’s official payment API status page showed no confirmed incident. This again suggests that some of the reported problems may involve connections between services rather than every Google system failing at the same time.
For businesses, the outage shows how dependent much of the modern internet has become on a small number of large technology companies. A failure at Google can affect email and video, but it can also interfere with shopping websites or business tools that rely on Google in the background. Even when the website itself remains online, one failed Google component can prevent part of the page from working correctly.
As of about 7 p.m. Central Time Sunday, many services appeared to be working for some users, but intermittent problems continued to be reported. Google had not publicly announced whether the outage was caused by a technical failure, a cyberattack or another problem. Until Google or federal investigators release evidence, claims that Iran or North Korea caused the disruption remain unconfirmed.
The outage is still developing, and its full size may not be known until Google explains what failed and how many services were affected.
