Why Is Google Calendar Down?

Check your Google Calendar. Don't see anything there? Could it be that your boss decided to grant a Wednesday miracle and cancel all meetings for the day? Nope, it's just that Google Calendar is currently down. Many Google Calendar users went on Twitter to lament the loss of their day's schedule, and also scheme ways to get out of the rest of their obligations for the remainder of the workday. Google has not specified the exact cause of the errors related to the Calendar app, but was able to resolve the issue relatively quickly for most users. (Update: As of 1:25 p.m. Eastern Time, Google Calendar was up and running again for all users.)

Google's app dashboard posted an update at 11:20 a.m. noting that they were looking into reports of problems with Google Calendar. At 12:25 p.m., another updated stated that full access to the Calendar was restored for some users, and that Google expected the problems to be resolved within an hour. The final update came at 1:25 p.m., when Google stated that all Google Calendars should be fully functioning.

Multiple sources, including International Business Times, reported that Google Calendar was experiencing an outage, however, Google classified the issue as a "service disruption."

Google Calendar also experienced issues in September, when users faced problems with their Calendars across two days, the 24th and 25th of the month. Google posted updates nothing that it was investigating the problem for several hours throughout the afternoon on Sept. 24, and the issue was finally resolved for all users at 11:30 a.m. on Sept. 25. During this interruption of access to Google Calendar, Google recommended that users change their calendar settings to show reminders using desktop notifications, rather than through email or SMS.

The service disruption on Wednesday definitely had some Google Calendar users scrambling to remember what events the day held for them, but the error was brief, and Google did not issue any workarounds.

Early in September, another Google app that many people depend on to go about their daily business, Google Drive, went down for a couple of hours (on a Friday no less!) and this problem was also resolved quickly on the same day that the errors first began.

In all three of these recent cases of service interruptions to Google apps, Gmail and other related apps were not compromised. At least for now, all Google apps are running as normal.

Images: Pixabay