Google Meet hit by widespread outage; users report ‘502 error’ across India

Google Meet experienced a major outage across India on Wednesday, leaving thousands of users unable to join or host video calls. The disruption forced many to cancel work meetings, online classes, and interviews.

According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, around 1,760 users reported issues by 1:55 p.m. Of these, 63 per cent flagged problems with the website, 35 per cent reported server connection issues, and about 3 per cent experienced video-quality disruptions. Many users trying to access meetings encountered a “502, that’s an error” message.

The outage quickly became a trending topic on social media platform X, with users sharing screenshots and asking, “Google Meet down for everyone?” and “Why is Google Meet down??” Several accounts tagged @GoogleIndia seeking clarification, while some urged the company to restore services quickly, noting that important calls could not proceed.

Confusion spread as a few users reported that the service was inaccessible for everyone in their organisation except themselves. Others said they could join calls, but their colleagues could not.

The disruption also sparked online commentary about broader tech outages, with one user writing, “First Cloudflare, then AWS… now GCP wants a turn too,” while another joked that they were still “waiting for a GCP outage.”

Google has yet to release an official statement explaining the cause of the disruption. The outage comes just a week after parts of the internet were affected by a large-scale outage linked to Cloudflare.

IANS