Google mobile services are down, impacting users worldwide

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Key notes

  • Google's services hold core functionality on most Android devices around the world.
  • Because of this, it is all the more difficult when their services experience downtimes.
  • This happened a few hours ago with Google, Gmail, the Google Play App, and more.
  • Google, as well as the community, were quick to provide solutions to this issue.
Google services mobile downtime

Anyone using an Android device knows how dependent their gadget is on having Google’s services working properly, from Gmail, to Google Play, Google Chrome, and more.

Well, users are sometimes met with errors, and this is what happened today as well, with millions of people being affected.

Google apps triggered error messages on Android devices

According to DownDetector.com, Google services have been experiencing outages these past hours, all of which were experienced on the mobile apps.

According to user feedback, whenever they tried accessing a Google app, they were met with the following error messages:

User reports brought the issue to Google’s attention, which updated their status page to:

We are aware of an issue with WebView causing some apps on Android to crash. We are currently working to fully validate the scope and a fix is in progressFortunately.

A few hours later, Google provided a solution to the issue:

Updating Android System WebView and Google Chrome via Google Play should now resolve the issue for all users.

  1. Navigate to Play Store app
  2. Search for Android System WebView
  3. Select the Update option
  4. Repeat these steps for Google Chrome

However, this solution didn’t seem to work for all users, that simply updating Google Chrome worked for them instead:

If updating Android System WebView doesn’t work: I couldn’t update it in the store and couldn’t find the app otherwise. I updated Google Chrome instead and it worked. All my apps stopped crashing.

If this does’t work either, one final solution suggested by various users was disabling WebView entirely:

Disable Android Webview in apps you’ll have to turn on system apps to find it if that doesn’t work disable Chrome and that will work I had to disable Chrome browser to get all my apps to work

All in all, while the bulk of the problem seems to have been solved for the moment, these solutions are worth remembering whenever this happens again, since this isn’t something that happens too rarely.

How were you affected by Google’s services being down? Let us know how it affected your use of your Android device by leaving us a message in the comments section below.

More about the topics: Android issues, Google