Google Down after Russia US Hack

Google hacked? Millions affected as Gmail, YouTube & Meet DOWN after Russia US hack 

Millions of people have been unable to access their Google accounts, including GMail and YouTube, after the world's largest search engine crashed. This comes just days after a major breach of US Government agencies by Russian hackers. The outage lasted for more than an hour.  Google not working has sparked chaos for businesses and families.

Downdetector.com has confirmed major issues with the website and its services

Google Drive, Google Trends and other programmes and services from Alphabet Inc are also down. 

Thousands of people have reported outages with the world's largest search engine. A statement from Google said: "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users.

"The affected users are unable to access Gmail. The word "Gmail" was replaced by other services. Google's service dashboard initially showed no errors but was quickly changed. It is believed more than 30,000 people reported problems when the search engine went down.

Nearly 70,000 outages of YouTube were also reported in the UK, US and India, as well as other countries. The TeamYouTube Twitter account tweeted: “We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now - our team is aware and looking into it. “We’ll update you here as soon as we have more news.” One person tweeted: “Google and every single one of their products is down: YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Docs, etc! 

“If this is not a perfect summary of 2020 I don't know what it is #googledown."

Another said: "Yoooo @Google what's going on yo!? @YouTube even @Gmail is down. #YouTubeDOWN." Someone else said they are "freaking out" following the crash. They tweeted: "Is anyone else’s #gmail down? Kind of freaking out @gmail."While someone else said it was the "worst day ever".

This global outage comes hours after the US Government was targeted by suspected Russian hackers in a cyber attack. According to reports, the hack was so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House over the weekend. The US Commerce Department confirmed on Sunday it has been a victim of a data breach.

According to sources, hackers broke into the NTIA’s office software, Microsoft’s Office 365, and staff emails at the agency were monitored by the hackers for months.

The department said in a statement to CNN: "We can confirm there has been a breach in one of our bureaus. "We have asked CISA and the FBI to investigate, and we cannot comment further at this time

"CISA is providing technical assistance to affected entities as they work to identify and mitigate any potential compromise."

John Ullyo, National Security Council spokesman, added: "The United States government is aware of these reports and we are taking all necessary steps to identify and remedy any possible issues related to this situation." One source said: "This is a much bigger story than one single agency.  "This is a huge cyber espionage campaign targeting the US government and its interests."

A spokesperson for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said: “We have been working closely with our agency partners regarding recently discovered activity on government networks.

"CISA is providing technical assistance to affected entities as they work to identify and mitigate any potential compromises.”