Google services are once again back online after an outage this morning affected thousands. Gmail, YouTube, and Drive were down for a few hours earlier this morning. The issue impacted the East Coast the most, though it was felt throughout the rest of North America and other places around the world. As of this writing, all services seem to be back to normal. As a lot of people are home at this time, many believed it was due to what the world is currently experiencing.

However, Google says that their services did not go down this morning because of strain on the system. Instead, it is believed that a router failure in Atlanta is to blame. Urs Hölzle, senior VP for Google Cloud's technical infrastructure tweeted out an explanation. "Very sorry about that! We had a router failure in Atlanta, which affected traffic routed through that region," he said. Hölzle went on to note, "Things should be back to normal now. Just to make sure: this wasn't related to traffic levels or any kind of overload."

Many people started to panic this morning after thinking that Google's system was failing due to strain. Millions of people all over the world are practicing social distance and staying home. Those who are lucky enough are able to work from home and depend on a lot of Google's services. As for the people who aren't able to work, YouTube is a huge form of free entertainment at the moment. Thankfully, strain from overuse does not seem to be the culprit here.

According to sources, the problem primarily affected the East Coast of the United States, but there were outages reported in other parts of the world. By 11:30am Eastern, there were more than 12,000 reports of outages across Google's services. For people who still don't have services to specifically Gmail, the tech giant says, "Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change." They're aware of the problem, located the reasoning behind it, and are in the process of getting everything up and functioning.

Right now isn't the most ideal time to have some services that many depend on to go down suddenly and without warning. People are stressed and an outage like this doesn't help, but at least it was something minor. In the meantime, it might be good for businesses who are operating online to look into backup services in case this happens again. Google has already made the decision to change the YouTube resolution defaults temporarily to help manage high volumes. So, we could see some further actions taken in the future to reduce stress. You can head over to the G Suite Status Dashboard for updates.