Service disruptions hit Google Calendar and Google Hangouts Meet Wednesday morning, dealing another blow to consumers and G Suite users who have now dealt with multiple service disruptions from Google in the past two months.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based internet giant acknowledged the Google Calendar and Google Hangouts Meet outages in mid-Wednesday morning messages on the G Suite status page, saying that it was investigating both issues. Thousands of complaints have been posted on Downdetector.com since about 10 a.m. Eastern Time.
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In a subsequent message posted early afternoon, Google said it expected the Google Calendar outage to end for most users by 1:40 p.m. ET without stating the cause of the disruption.
As for Google Hangouts Meet, the company has yet to provide a timeline for when regular service will resume. The company said affected users can access the service through meet.google.com or one of its native apps and share the link directly with participants as a workaround.
In a later statement, Google said that “the problem with Google Calendar and Hangouts Meet should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better. "
One G Suite partner called Wednesday's outages frustrating and said they follow several service disruptions that have affected G Suite or parts of G Suite since early May. On Monday, Gmail spam filters stopped working for an hour, and at the beginning of the month, a widespread outage impacted multiple Google Cloud services.
“These two issues today are inconvenient and frustrating for our customers and us,” said Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global, a Westborough, Mass.-based reseller.
Falcon said “equally frustrating” is Google's lack of information around why there have been so many outages and when they will be resolved.
“The last two weeks or so haven't been great as far as service reliability for G Suite,” he said, calling the recent issues “uncharacteristically disruptive.”
Falcon said the Google Hangouts Meet outage was impacting his clients more than the Google Calendar outage, preventing users from using Chromebox client computers in conference rooms to connect to the video conferencing service. He said another frustration is that his company can't tell if the Chromebox issue is related to the Google Hangouts Meet outage or a separate problem.
“There is not enough information for customers to know if the problem they are experiencing is the one Google is working on,” he said.
While the outages are inconvenient, Falcon said, they are not enough to call into question Google's first price hike ever for G Suite, which went into effect earlier this year.
“Google's view on the price increase was that the breadth of features had grown significantly over a decade,” he said. “It wasn't unreasonable.”
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