Google Meet Outage Disrupts Thousands of Users

Google Meet experienced a widespread service disruption on Monday afternoon, preventing users across the U.S. from joining calls and generating thousands of outage reports.

Nut Graf The popular video conferencing platform went offline around 1:30 PM ET, leaving remote workers, educators and students unable to connect. The outage, which also affected Workspace, Gmail and Chat components, underscores the risks of reliance on a single provider for critical communications.

Outage Timeline and Scope

1:30 PM ET (17:30 UTC): Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard logged the incident, marking Google Meet as “service unavailable.”
1:36 PM ET: Downdetector recorded over 15,000 individual reports of failures to load meetings, dropped calls and audio/video blackouts.
2:00 PM ET: Social media complaints surged, with users sharing error messages and canceled meeting prompts.

User Impact

Participants saw spinning loading icons or “Unable to connect” errors when launching Meet.
Some managed a workaround by switching to the native Meet mobile app or an alternate browser.
Virtual classrooms and business meetings abruptly ceased, prompting lighthearted relief tweets about “meetings that could have been emails.”

Google’s Response

Google acknowledged the issue via its Workspace Status Dashboard, affirming that engineering teams were investigating the root cause. A resolution timeline remained unavailable at publication.

Alternative Workarounds

Launch the Google Meet mobile app, which reported fewer disruptions.
Switch browsers (e.g., move from Chrome to Safari or Firefox).
Use backup platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams for urgent calls.

Broader Implications

This outage follows similar service lapses earlier in 2025, highlighting the vulnerability of businesses heavily dependent on single-vendor communication tools. Organizations are urged to maintain contingency plans and diversify conferencing solutions to minimize future downtime risks.