It was a frustrating night for social media and email users as multiple platforms experienced outages. First, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook services were down for an extended period, leaving users unable to access their accounts or refresh their feeds.
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Social Media & Email meltdown
Thankfully, those issues were eventually resolved, but shortly after, Google’s popular services YouTube and Gmail started experiencing problems of their own. According to reports, around 9 PM IST, users began noticing issues loading content on YouTube and accessing their Gmail inboxes.
While the disruptions at Google didn’t seem as widespread as Meta’s earlier outage, they still caused headaches for many users trying to watch videos or check their emails. Outage tracking sites saw a spike in reports about YouTube and Gmail being down or having loading problems.
Both Google and YouTube acknowledged the issues on their official channels. YouTube posted that they were “on it” and working to fix the loading errors. A few hours later, they confirmed the problems were resolved after scaling up their systems to handle increased traffic loads.
Google similarly attributed the short-lived Gmail outage to a surge in traffic that required additional capacity. By late evening, both YouTube and Gmail appeared to be back up and running normally for users across platforms.
While outages are never convenient, they serve as reminders of how reliant we’ve become on these digital services for information, entertainment, and communication in our daily lives. The good news is that the issues were temporary this time around, but their frequency highlights the importance of preparedness and robust infrastructure for tech companies.
