Google Meet down across India; workplaces, virtual classrooms hit

Google’s online video conferencing platform Google Meet on Wednesday experienced an outage that affected thousands of users across India, disrupting virtual meetings for workplaces, schools and individuals.

Outage reports began appearing at around 11 am IST, according to Downdetector, which tracks service disruptions. By about 12:29 pm, more than 1,700 users in India had reported issues with the platform.

Around 62% of users said they were unable to access Google Meet via its website, while 35% cited server connectivity problems that prevented them from joining ongoing calls, Downdetector data showed.

Some users reported that the mobile app functioned intermittently, though many said they could not get past the loading screen.

Reports of disruptions came from major cities including New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Madurai.

Several users said meetings froze, abruptly ended or failed to load, while others were unable to join entirely.

Screenshots shared online showed an error message displayed to users attempting to join meetings: “502. That’s an error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.”

Many users took to X to report the outage or express frustration.

“Google Meet crashed before my will to work did,” one user wrote. Another said: “Google Meet is down for everyone in my org but not for me.”

Some users pointed to a recent series of global technology outages.

“Oct 20: AWS down. Oct 29: Azure down. Oct 30: Oracle Cloud down. Nov 18: Cloudflare down. Nov 26: Google Meet down. The cloud providers are playing musical chairs with our uptime and nobody’s winning,” one post said.

Google Meet faced a major outage in the United States in September, when more than 15,000 users reported issues accessing the service.

The latest disruption comes a week after an outage at web infrastructure provider Cloudflare temporarily brought down several major websites, including X, Canva and ChatGPT.