Some Filipino workers’ momentum was disrupted on Thursday afternoon when they experienced errors in Google‘s e-mail service on a rare occasion.
Ian Urrutia of online publication The Rest Is Noise PH shared that he had a “hard time attaching files and sending e-mails in bulk.”
“Long weekend pa naman bukas,” he tweeted.
August 21 is a special non-working day in commemoration of the Ninoy Aquino Day that annually remembers the assassination of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr., considered an icon of democracy in the country.
Another Twitter user wrote that she has “been trying to stay on top of things for months” but it was Gmail’s sudden unavailability that pushed her past her “breaking point” today.
been trying to stay on top of things for months but what really pushed me past my breaking point was gmail being down and unable to send my email cool cool cool 👍
— ariadne 🌿 (@arialligraphy) August 20, 2020
Another Twitter user expressed his disappointment over the outage and lamented that he couldn’t work due to the error.
nagloloko gmail ko… paano ako magtratrabaho 🙁
— Marti Espenido (@martiespenido) August 20, 2020
His sentiments were likewise echoed by another online user who said that he was in the middle of “rushing” something for work.
Down yung gmail 😭 Kung kelan may ni-rrush. Kainis
— Georgy (@GeorgeeSantos) August 20, 2020
Another Twitter user acknowledged that Gmail being down is a real “struggle” since e-mail services are considered the primary means of communication and the link to having accounts in other platforms.
grabe lang the struggle is real if @gmail is down
— mich☁️[하:늘] (@michelle_cao_) August 20, 2020
A Filipino jested that Google users should momentarily switch to “old school Yahoo” because of Gmail’s outage.
WAAAAH ANG HIRAP MAGSEND NG WORK OUTPUTS NA WALANG GMAIL!!!!!! SWTICH TO OLDSCHOOL YAHOO GAMING NA TAYO!
[email protected]— joshuaaaaaaa (@itsjoshuadaza) August 20, 2020
The incident prompted the keyword “Gmail” to enter the top five trending list of Twitter Philippines.
Based on a website tracking the outage of websites and other services, majority had reported having problems with Google’s e-mail service from past 11 a.m.
The three most reported problems involved file or photo attachment, logging in and receiving messages, according to Downdetector.
The issue was not just experienced by Filipinos but other workers and users around the world such as the United States, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Belgium, based on a live outage map.
Based on Google Suite’s status dashboard, an investigation is currently ongoing about the issue.
It also noted that other outages in its services are currently being investigated as well, namely file storage Google Drive, word processor Google Docs, messaging service Google Chat, video communication service Google Meet, note-taking service Google Keep, telephone service Google Voice and discussion service Google Groups.
The outage is a rare incident but last year, it was reported that its cloud platform had issues that involved third party apps like Snapchat and Discord.
