Google experiencing widespread outage affecting most services

Having trouble signing into Google stuff today? You're not the only one. According to several Tweets sent out over the last hour or so, Google services are seeing disruption. Hangouts, Gmail, Google Play, and Play Music all seem to be seeing interruptions. Google has yet to comment on the outages, but so many complaints can't lead to some sort of user error. Some users are even seeing authentication errors, while others simply can't access services they rely on, like Hangouts or email.

A quick check with Down Detector shows the issue isn't minor, either. The typically reliable Google servers are experiencing a hiccup.

As we can see via the DD map, the problem seems to affect the US and Western Europe heavily, but that could also be because that's where most Google users come from. Such a widespread reporting area also suggests the outage isn't regional.

The last time Google saw a notable outage was last June, when Drive was down for the count. Unfortunately, we can't pin this to any one service — it affects everything cloud-based.

So there you have it. If you're affected, sit tight. Google won't let this one drag out for long. Sometimes, you just have to revert to plain text messaging if you want to get a point across. As for email or downloading apps — or streaming music — we've got no workaround, sadly.