By
Temitope Olatunji
April 26th, 2024
Users in a number of countries all over the world report function disruption in the work of Google’s G Suite services.
There have been reports of a G Suite global services disruption on Google LLC (NASDAQ: GOOGL) owned applications including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and others. This latest service disruption comes a week after Google’s Australian controversy in which the tech giant warned users that Google services were “at risk” over law reform. While these new service issues are unrelated to the previous warning from Google, the timing has made the situation a bit controversial.
With the new issues, users in parts of the United States, India, Malaysia, Australian, and Japan have reported being unable to access or log-in to their Gmail accounts, while others are saying new emails are not showing up in the app and they are unable to add attachments. Some Google Drive users have also reported being unable to upload new files to the cloud.
Google has confirmed this latest development saying:
“We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 8/20/20, 10:38 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. 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.”
After a series of updates have been made, the tech giant affirmed hours later that it has restored services for some users.
G Suite Services in Today’s World
G Suite is a suite of cloud computing, productivity, and collaboration tools, software, and products developed by Google, first launched on August 28, 2006, as Google Apps for Your Domain.
G-Suite comprises Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Currents for communication, Drive for storage, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, Forms, and Sites for productivity and collaboration; and, depending on the plan, an Admin panel and Vault for managing users and the services. It also includes the digital interactive whiteboard Jamboard.
The entire list of G-Suite applications has become a viable and an almost indispensable tool for most businesses today. As it was reported by TechCrunch, Google noted back in March this year, about 2 billion users rely on Google’s G-Suite and this wide adoption has served a dual purpose, help people leverage the offering of technology in their everyday needs and also serving as a key source of revenue for the tech giant.
Top Tech Apps Have Seen Glitches in Recent Times
Besides the reported Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) security breach that saw the account of top profile individuals compromised in a $121,000 Bitcoin (BTC) scam, major tech companies have seen their software experience glitches in recent times.
Coinspeaker reported back in July the malfunctioning of some iOS Apps including Spotify Technology SA (NYSE: SPOT), TikTok, and others as caused by Facebook’s (NASDAQ: FB) Software Development Kit (SDK). The Facebook SDK communicates back and forth with a data server. The client app code expects the data returned by the server to be in a particular format. But when the server suddenly starts sending data in a different format, the framework code is not prepared to handle the invalid response. So, the app code tries to access values that don’t exist – which leads to a fatal error, and the app crashes.
While most of these crashes and disruption usually have quick fixes from the tech companies, the inconveniences such as those caused by G Suite services disruption can be unprecedented and should be generally avoided.