Google Services Hit by Partial Outage in US

Lead: Google’s core services-including Search, Gmail, YouTube and Drive-suffered a partial outage across the United States on September 18, 2025, when users encountered login failures and “502” errors beginning at 10:41 AM EDT.

Nut Graf: The disruption, driven by authentication and DNS errors, briefly impeded millions of users’ ability to access key Google platforms, underscoring widespread reliance on its infrastructure and prompting rapid mitigation efforts by Google engineers.

Impact Highlights

Downdetector logged over 25,000 incident reports at peak, with 87% citing login issues, 9% web errors and 5% platform unavailability.
Major metropolitan areas affected included New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco.
Services relying on Google authentication-such as third-party sites using “Sign in with Google”-also experienced failures.

Timeline of Events

10:41 AM EDT: Users began reporting failed logins across Search, Gmail, YouTube and Drive. 11:00 AM EDT: DownDetector incidents spiked; reports showing “502” errors during authentication attempts. 11:30 AM EDT: Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard confirmed service restoration was underway after identifying and mitigating the root cause of the login failures.

Technical Cause and Resolution

Google attributed the outage to an automated quota misconfiguration in its API management system that propagated globally, triggering authentication rejections and DNS resolution errors. Engineers bypassed the faulty quota checks and applied patches to restore normal service within roughly one hour.

User Guidance

Refresh pages after 11:30 AM EDT to regain access; explicit workarounds are unnecessary as services are now back online.
Monitor Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard for any residual or follow-up notifications.

Despite its brevity, the incident highlights the critical importance of robust authentication and quota management in large-scale cloud services.