It looks like Google's in the middle of a major service disruption — at the moment, Gmail, Google+, and Hangouts all appear to be having major connection issues. Reports on Twitter are coming in fast and furious, and we've also noticed extremely slow connections on YouTube, Google Docs, and Google Drive. Google Play Music also appears to be down for the time being. Google's homepage still loads fine, and search appears to be working without any issue right now.
Google's App Status Dashboard currently shows no connection problems, however — we'll see how long it takes for that to update. Google's competitors have apparently taken note of the outage too. Yahoo took the rather bold step of tweeting about Gmail's outage — one could say they're tempting fate a bit afterYahoo's email went down for multiple days last month. We're reaching out to Google to find out the cause of today's outage, but in the meantime this gives you an excuse to stop checking email a little bit early before the weekend.
Update: Things are starting to come back to life after the seemingly brief outage, though full reliability and functionality is still very much missing. Gmail is sending and receiving messages again, though issues with contacts still persist. Hangouts appears to be hit or miss right now, with messages sometimes sending in large bursts after not working for several minutes. Google has also updated its app status page, which now notes a partial outage for Gmail with all other services supposedly unaffected. Google+ and Google Play Music, however, remain inaccessible. We'll be keeping an eye out to see when things at Google are totally back to normal.
