Google Meet Hit by Widespread Outage, Users Struggle to Join Sessions

Google Meet Outage: Monitoring platform Downdetector reported at least 1,760 individuals in India experiencing problems with Google Meet as of 12:29 pm.

The popular video conferencing service, Google Meet, experienced a significant outage for many Indian users on Wednesday. People faced difficulties connecting to their scheduled online meetings on the platform.

Issues Reported on Outage Trackers

Outage monitoring platform Downdetector noted that a minimum of 1,760 people in India had reported issues with Google Meet. This count was recorded up until 12:29 pm. The majority of affected users seemed unable to access Google Meet meetings through the official website.

When attempting to join calls, affected users encountered a specific error message. The message stated: “502. That’s an error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds. That’s all we know,”

Social Media Reaction from Netizens

Many users quickly took to the platform X to express their disappointment and report the service issues.

One user jokingly shared on X, “google meet crashed before my will to work did”. Another person posted, “Google meet is down for everyone in my org but not for me”.

A third frustrated user commented, “Google meet is down!! Why every big tech is going down this month?”

“Can’t open google meet. i’ve never been more free,” wrote another user, while someone else posted, “What happened to the Google meet and chat???”

“Google meet is down ?…..I can join the meet but my rest of the team is facing issues,” an X user detailed.

Prior Outage in the US

Earlier this year, in September, Google Meet experienced a significant disruption in the United States. The service became non-functional for over 15,000 users during that time.

Downdetector.com data showed that 79% of the complaints were about failing to start a conference. Server connection issues accounted for 16% of reports. The remaining 5% of reports were related to problems with the application itself.

In its initial statement, Google confirmed the outage stemmed from a “recent change in content edge cache.”

The company mentioned that their engineers reversed this change to successfully restore the service. It concluded by saying, “We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue.”

Broader Recent Tech Disruptions

This Google Meet incident follows an outage at the web-infrastructure company Cloudflare just a week prior. That major disruption affected several popular websites, including Canva, X, and ChatGPT.

Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, acknowledged the failure after the issue was fixed. He admitted that they “failed” their customers “and the broader Internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us”.