Complaints started to flood “DownDetectors” reporting site at approximately 04:40 GMT of a Google outage. Gmail users are experiencing faults such as new emails not showing in their G mail suite, unable to upload new files to the Google cloud while others can’t even access their G mail inboxes.

With more than two billion users relying on G Suite, this outage is having quite an impact. A majority of the disruption seems focused in India, some of the US, Australia, Japan and Malaysia.

Google’s latest statement, “Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 8/20/20, 1:51 PM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. Gmail sending issues, Meet recording issues, Creating files issues in Drive, CSV user upload issues in Admin Console, Posting message issues in Google Chat. “.

If you’ve been frantically trying to resolve a potential internal IT issue, you can take a breather and know that it’s not you, its Google, and they’re doing all that can to fix it in a timely fashion.

We’d be interested to know how many readers effected by this outage have considered their DR options if Google were unable to recover from this. Have you got adequate backup solutions in place to restore files previously in Google Drive? What about your contacts and emails, do any of your backup solutions cover mail or are you expecting Google to take ownership your data recovery? You may want to read the terms and conditions of your contract with Google, they’ll host your data, but there’s no backup, it’s on you. Don’t “close the stable gate after the horse has bolted”, secure your data now, let us know what platforms you’re working on and we’ll clue you in on how cost-effective backup solutions can be.