Yesterday, on December 14th, all services associated with Google Workspace (AKA GSuite - or for those who aren't familiar with it, what is essentially Google's paid "business" services) went offline for roughly an hour from 7AM to 8AM Eastern time.
Users typically first encountered the error when attempting to send email or after receiving an error indicating that their account could "not be found" when attempting to login to Google services.
Other impacted services include Youtube and the Google Nest home security service.
Google's official statement to the press described the cause in extremely general terms:
Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period,” a Google spokesperson said. “The authentication system issue was resolved at (7:32 a.m. EST). All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.
This outage follows similar major failures with Microsoft's Office services and Windows Updates as well as service interruptions with Amazon's EC2 and related cloud products.