Initially, it looked like South Africans may have missed Google’s recent outage, but reports have started flooding in of people experiencing issues with some Google services. Most of the issues reported are with the Gmail service, while other apps also seem to be experiencing connection problems.

Some of the other services affected include Drive, Docs, Meet, Groups, Chat, Keep and Voice, which are all experiencing service disruptions. Google has confirmed that it knows about the issues and are reporting them live on its G Suite Status Dashboard.

According to the local DownDetector website, people in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town have started reporting issues with the services since early this morning. Reports started around 7am CAT, and have been ongoing with hundreds of reports logged locally. Globally, thousands have been complaining about the service disruption, specifically with Gmail.

It looks like the main issue across all services is uploading of files, with people reporting that they cannot attach files to emails being the main concern right now. People are also experiencing connection errors (we experienced this in the Stuff office), as well as login issues.

Google says that it is investigating the issues and is actively working on restoring services. “We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 8/20/20, 11:38 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Gmail sending issues, Meet recording issues, Creating files issues in Drive, CSV user upload issues in Admin Console, Posting message issues in Google Chat, Sites adding new pages issues, Keep issues, Voice mail issues,” the update from 10:38 reads.

We can’t even imagine the mass chaos that would ensue if Gmail went down and didn’t come back. So many face-to-face meetings and phone calls would need to take place, and we can’t have that right now.