Gmail is down across the world — but not for everyone

Gmail app icon on iPhone
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Are you having problems with Gmail, or another of Google’s many, many apps? You’re not alone, because users have been reporting problems accessing their Gmail account on both mobile and desktop devices.

Issues seem to be affecting the ability to log into accounts across the U.S., U.K. and Europe. What’s more it’s not restricted to Gmail, with Google’s own status page noting issues with the Google Chat, Meet, Calendar, and Groups.

According to Down Detector issues began at around 3 a.m. ET/8 a.m. GMT, and slowly grew in the run up to 5 a.m. Google has confirmed that there is an issue, with its general status page claiming that: “We are currently investigating an issue affecting user access to multiple services affecting users in Europe."

Meanwhile the Gmail Workspace dashboard explicitly confirms that some users are unable to access their Gmail accounts — cutting them off from all their emails in the process. TechRadar Pro also notes that two factor login prompts are running more slowly, and resulted in an error in some cases, further frustrating the login issues.

The issues haven’t affected everyone, though. Only one member of the Tom’s Guide team has been affected, but they were still able to log in eventually. Likewise we’ve been able to access Google Meet calls without issue.

Still the problem is widespread enough that people are complaining about it on sites like Twitter — though not as much as they did when Snapchat and Facebook services died.

But since Google is now aware of the situation, and considering the outage is only affecting a portion of users, it hopefully won’t be very long until everything is up and running again. According to Google, an update is expected by 11 a.m. U.K. time, or 6 a.m. Eastern.

We’ll update this story if we hear anything else. In the meantime anyone locked out of their work accounts can enjoy something more interesting. Like all the new Disney Plus Day content that's hit the streaming service.

Tom Pritchard
UK Phones Editor

Tom is the Tom's Guide's UK Phones Editor, tackling the latest smartphone news and vocally expressing his opinions about upcoming features or changes. It's long way from his days as editor of Gizmodo UK, when pretty much everything was on the table. He’s usually found trying to squeeze another giant Lego set onto the shelf, draining very large cups of coffee, or complaining about how terrible his Smart TV is.