Google Meet hit by major outage in India, users unable to join calls

Google Meet experienced a significant outage across India on Wednesday, disrupting work meetings, virtual classes and interviews as thousands of users struggled to access the platform.

The video-conferencing service began malfunctioning shortly after midday, with many users reporting that they were unable to join or host calls. Instead of connecting, screens displayed an error message reading: “502, that’s an error.”

Data from Downdetector showed that by 1:55 p.m., roughly 1,760 users had flagged issues. According to the breakdown, 63 per cent reported problems accessing the website, 35 per cent blamed server-related faults and around 3 per cent cited video-quality disruptions.

As the outage spread, social media platform X saw a surge of posts from confused and frustrated users trying to determine whether the problem was widespread.

Screenshots, complaints and humour quickly flooded timelines, with messages such as “Google Meet down for everyone?” and “Why is Google Meet down??” circulating widely. Some users tagged @GoogleIndia demanding an update.

One user wrote, “Itni mushkil se to interview mila tha, Google Meet hi down chala gaya,” capturing the frustration felt by many whose plans were derailed.

Interestingly, some individuals reported that the platform was down for their entire organisation except them, while others said they could join meetings but their colleagues could not, adding to the overall confusion.

The outage prompted comparisons with other recent technology disruptions. Several posts joked about a pattern emerging, referencing recent incidents involving Cloudflare and AWS. “First Cloudflare, then AWS… now GCP wants a turn too,” one user wrote.

Google has yet to release an official explanation for the disruption.

The incident follows a wave of recent global outages, including last week’s widespread internet disruption linked to Cloudflare, raising concerns about the resilience of digital infrastructure relied upon for daily communication.

With IANS Inputs