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ZDNET’s takeaways
- Google Meet is currently experiencing a widespread outage.
- There are a few workarounds, like using the app or another browser.
- Google is investigating the problem.
If you’re having trouble with Google Meet today, you’re not alone.
Google’s popular video conference software, which we named the best video conferencing software for small businesses, is suffering a widespread outage.
Shortly before 2 p.m. ET, reports of an outage began spiking on DownDetector.com, an outage tracking site owned by ZDNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis.
After no problems all day, close to 15,000 users suddenly reported issues. Within minutes, users were flooding social media with complaints about missing meetings and classes — and of course, a few celebrations that the meeting that should have been an email was now toast.
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Given that the reports spiked at once, it seems like the outage is affecting a lot of users. Other Google products, like Workspace, Chat, Gmail, and even Search, also saw a spike in reports, but nowhere near the level that Meet was experiencing.
A few workarounds for the Google Meet outage
I was able to get the Google Meet website to load, but it just spins if I attempt to start a meeting. I did find a few workarounds, though.
The Meet app loads fine for me, and I was able to make and receive a video call when I tried. Some users have said they were able to use Meet in Safari, though I wasn’t able to test that. This might not be a viable answer for large-scale meetings and classes, but it might get you by if you’re looking for a one-on-one.
The company saw a similar disruption in June, but it was resolved in less than an hour.
At the time of this writing, Google’s Cloud Service Health Status page is reporting service issues with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. Google acknowledged the problem on its Workspace Dashboard, where it said, “Some Google Meet customers are experiencing issues with loading the meet UI,” and “our engineering team continues to investigate the issue.”
I’ve reached out to Google to see if it has any further details.
