From Delhi to Bengaluru: Google Meet outage leaves India’s workforce stranded

 

Google Meet suffered a major outage on Tuesday, disrupting work calls, online classes and interviews for users across India. The issue began in the afternoon and quickly showed up on Downdetector, where complaints started rising within minutes.

According to the platform’s data, 67% of users said the Google Meet website wouldn’t load, while 32% reported server connectivity problems that prevented them from joining ongoing calls. Some users said the mobile app worked slightly better, but many couldn’t get past the loading screen.

The outage hit several major regions at once, with reports coming in from Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Madurai, Bengaluru and Chennai. Many users said their meetings froze or kicked them out, while others couldn’t join at all.

Google Meet is widely used for office meetings, virtual training sessions, remote interviews and online classes. Because it’s seen as one of Google’s more stable products, many users said they were surprised by Tuesday’s sudden breakdown.

This isn’t the first time Google Meet has experienced a widespread outage this year. In September, more than 15,000 users in the US were unable to access the platform during a similar disruption. Google later linked that incident to a “recent change in content edge cache,” which engineers rolled back to restore normal service.

Students, job-seekers and employees in India said the latest outage left them scrambling. Some classrooms had to be postponed, while several companies hurriedly switched to backup platforms.

As soon as the downtime began, users took to social media—mixing frustration with humour.

One user wrote: “Google Meet is down for everyone, but my org uses Teams… 😑 Every big tech is going down this month.”

Another said: “Google Meet is down. Nature is healing. Time for a nap.”

A third user pointed out the recent wave of 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.”

A fourth user, who missed a crucial meeting, added: “Itni mushkil se to interview mila tha, Google Meet hi down chala gaya.”