Services have been up and running again in Morocco for a few hours.
Rabat – Morocco was among the countries hit during a rare global outage of Google services this morning.
Between 12:30 and 1:00 p.m. local time, internet users in Morocco began noticing difficulty in accessing Google services such as Gmail, Google Docs, and YouTube. Google Maps and the Android Play Store were also down.
The Google outage was not limited to Morocco, however. In an unusual occurrence, Google services were down across the globe.
The tech giant said at the time it was aware of the issue and that it was affecting a majority of users, according to BBC.
The outage lasted for approximately half an hour before users could access services again.
Millions of people in Morocco and across the globe rely on Google services such as Gmail and Docs for everyday work activities, especially with remote work still the norm in many of the affected areas.
However, when users tried to access these services during the outage, they received a simple message: “Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
For many employees and employers working remotely, the outage caused a lapse in essential communication.
Some users discovered they were still able to access these services while in “incognito mode,” which does not record the users’ browsing activity.
The outage also impacted certain apps such as Pokemon Go and Google-connected smart devices such as Home speakers. Verified Twitter user Joe Brown tweeted that he was sitting “in the dark” in his child’s room because Google Home controls the light: “Rethinking … a lot right now.”
The Google search engine, however, remained up and running during the outage.
Such mass outages are rare for Google, with the most recent notable incident occurring in June 2019. Users in the United States had trouble accessing some services due to an accidental widespread change in server settings that Google only intended to apply to a few machines in a specific region.
