SOPA Images/Contributor/LightRocket via Getty Images
Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.
ZDNET’s takeaways
- Google Meet experienced a widespread outage.
- There are a few workarounds, like using the app or another browser.
- Google has since fixed problem.
Google Meet is back after a widespread outage, Monday.
At the time of this writing, Google’s Cloud Service Health Status page is reporting no service issues with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive.
“Today some users may have experienced a short disruption of service when loading Google Meet. Service has since been restored for any impacted users,” a Google spokesperson told ZDNET.
Google’s popular video conference software, which we named the best video conferencing software for small businesses, began having issues earlier in the day.
Also: The most impressive piece of tech hardware I’ve tested in 2025
Shortly before 2 p.m. ET, reports of an outage started 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.
Given that the reports spiked at once, it seemed like the outage affected 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 did.
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.”
The company saw a similar disruption in June, but it was resolved in less than an hour.
A few workarounds for the next Google Meet outage
I was able to get the Google Meet website to load during the outage, but it kept spinning if I attempted to start a meeting. I did find a few workarounds, though.
The Meet app loaded fine for me, and I was able to make and receive a video call when I tried. If the desktop version of Meets has a future outage, try the app first. 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.
