Filipino workers encounter connection glitches to Google, Gmail, YouTube

June 5, 2023 - 6:13 PM
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Small toy figures are seen in front of Google logo in this illustration picture, April 8, 2019. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/File Photo)

Google, its services and its subsidiaries dominated topics on social media in the Philippines as workers and web surfers reported accessing the platforms on Monday afternoon, June 5.

Google, the world’s largest search engine, and its services such as Gmail and YouTube on which operations of small to large companies depend.

At around 3 p.m., several Filipinos took to social media to complain about issues they encountered while using these websites.

“Is the entire Google workspace down?” a Filipino asked on Twitter.

“Huh… Is YouTube down?” another Filipino tweeted.

“Google works when I need it the least but being down when I’m trying to finish a research paper, you can’t make this up,” another Pinoy complained.

As of writing, the keyword “Google” and “Gmail’ landed on the trending topics list on Twitter Philippines. The former garnered 522,000 tweets and the latter got 19,500 tweets.

Provider issue

The keyword “PLDT” was also on this list. Some Filipinos initially reported that Google services were not loading because they were having connectivity issues.

Reports suggest, however, that subscribers of other broadband providers do not experience the same issue.

“For me, it’s a PLDT issue. I can connect to Google services just fine when I use Globe LTE but not when I use PLDT wifi,” a Filipino said on Twitter.

Downdetector.ph, an outage tracker, recorded about Google problems starting at 3:07 p.m. They then peaked at 4:07 p.m. with 1,295 reports.

As of posting time, accessibility to Google has not yet been restored, affecting the workflow of thousands in the Philippines for more than three hours.

So far, there are no statements yet from Google or PLDT about these incidents.

This was not the first that the search engine giant figured in a massive outage.

Last August, more than 40,000 users reported issues with the search engine giant according to Downdetector.com.

READ: Google down for thousands of users —Downdetector