
Google Calendar Is Down - dnlserrano
https://calendar.google.com/
======
djsumdog
I moved off to Radicale years ago:

[https://radicale.org/](https://radicale.org/)

I use it with Thunderbird, and DavDroid (now DavX) to handle all my events and
contacts (SMS contacts even show up correctly in Hangouts on Android phones)

I realize GCal is rarely ever down, but they do harvest all your data to sell
you shit.

Here's a basic Dockerfile for Radicale if you want to try it out:

[https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/dockerfiles/Radic...](https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/tree/master/dockerfiles/Radicale)

~~~
ma2rten
I work at google. I am pretty sure google calendar data is not used for ads
targeting. The same is true for gmail.

~~~
chipperyman573
Then what do they gain from it?

~~~
ma2rten
It's part of the google eco system. It's integrated with android, google
assistant, gmail, ... Chromebooks need web-only replacements for Outlook and
Office.

It's also a freemium product, because you can pay for gSuite.

------
stuxnet79
I guess it's time for all the Google engineers to put their LeetCode skills to
the test.

~~~
mav3rick
Google services have a good track record of uptime. You don't complain on the
countless hours of uptime. HN hate at it again

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teilo
Man, June has just flown by. I can't believe it's 404 Error already.

------
bluetidepro
Surprised nothing shows up on
[https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status)
for it. What's the point of a status site that doesn't reflect the status?

~~~
twostorytower
It's amazing how many of these status pages don't actually work in many
situations.

~~~
SilasX
Wasn't there that time AWS had some outage, but the red-circle picture (for
failure) was itself hosted on the unavailable AWS service, so their status
page didn't show it as being unavailable? Or am I mis-remembering
something/repeating an urban legend?

~~~
Dragonai
Nah, you're remembering correctly, this happened. The failure icon was hosted
on S3, but S3 was down. It was a great moment.

Here's their tweet about it:
[https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836656664635846656](https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/836656664635846656)

~~~
SilasX
Thank you for confirming, and the citation!

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EthanV2
Over an hour into the outage, still no word at all from Google on the status
page apart from "We're investigating"

~~~
7ewis
They provide updates to customers, but I'm under NDA with them.

~~~
devy
I think you meant "paid customers". Pretty much all the people wrote here are
"customers" one way or the other. By "updates" if you meant the message in
GSuite Admin account notification section, it's no more insight than what's
describing here:
[https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=cc...](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=2&iid=cc21ebe3962430b2e4ae2b52e3dde98f)

~~~
RobertoG
"You're not the customer; you're the product."

That, by the way, and surprisingly for me, it seems it's a quote from 1973:

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/)

------
KenanSulayman
Just got 4 calls from different departments and two people coming here saying
the internet is broken ("Google calendar is broken company wide!").

(Please introduce more meaningful error messages, Google)

~~~
CalamityAdam
I'm assuming they never thought they'd need such an error page

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iblaine
Google Calendar being down for nearly an hour settles it. No meetings today.
Everyone is free to 'work from home'!

~~~
driverdan
Better yet, allow everyone to work remotely every day and discover how much
more productive they are.

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flanbiscuit
This is the 2nd time a Google product has been down in the last month. What is
going on there?

Previous one was only 15 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421)

~~~
faissaloo
Ikr, Instagram recently went down too, what's going on with FANG recently?
Back a few years ago things like this would be unheard of

~~~
sp332
In what year exactly did none of Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google have a
service outage like this?

~~~
jedberg
As the person most closely responsible for Netflix’s nines from 2011-2014,
definitely not 2011-2014!

We worked hard and managed to keep it pretty high, but in all that time I
think we only had two or three perfect weeks worldwide.

------
Vector919
What's going on with google lately? First the google cloud outage earlier this
month and now this? I wonder if there's some sort of systemic problem they're
dealing with

~~~
brobdingnagians
Now I'm curious when the last time Google search went down? they must lose a
lot of money everytime that happens. or is that one of those services where
they spend ridiculous amounts of money and talent on making sure it never goes
down?

~~~
amelius
I'm guessing that Google search is easier to distribute over a larger set of
machines, since the data it uses is static to a large degree and less bound to
specific users.

~~~
travisjungroth
Search also has the possibility of degrading nicely, unlike a calendar. You
could store the top million sites in some backup service and drop down to
string matching if you had to. Searching for “how to train a hunting dog”?
Here’s the Wikipedia page for Dog. Best of luck.

------
faeyanpiraat
Also I would like to point out an interesting side effect that the #1 result
in google for "Google calendar 404" is down with a "Too many requests" error
:D

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manigandham
This is especially chaotic for business GSuite users. Wonder if there's an
offline/local cache service available for cloud-hosted systems, that would be
a good middle-ground between local control and cloud-backed scale.

~~~
soverance
At the very least, if you had your Google Calendar synced to your mobile
device (with the Calendar app) you can still view your meetings offline. You
just can't add new ones.

------
QuadrupleA
Writing your own little personal-use web apps can be really nice - not sure
how common this is, but I highly recommend it. I did it for tasks, time
tracking, invoicing, and personal finances, partly because Google and others
kept "upgrading" and screwing up the UI & performance of the tools I was
relying on.

Each took about a day to write, and is customized exactly the way I like it;
if I need a shortcut key, a weird little feature, etc. I can do it. I'm kind
of an optimization / performance nut too, so they all run uber-fast, no
perceptible delay from click to page / screen loaded (Sqlite is great for
these kinds of things). Data is totally private and under your control. It's
really nice.

However, calendar was complicated enough that I just use Google's. Might be
time to rethink..

~~~
MattSayar
That's a cool project, and it's a cool trick to avoid a dependency on a large
company's app. Buuut There's always going to be a dependency on your ISP, your
web hosting provider's internet access and their hardware uptime/backup
schedule, your neighborhood's telephone poles and wires, your utility company,
your hosting company's utility company, etc. etc. etc.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and I try not to think about how
fragile it all really is all the time.

~~~
333c
To circumvent this, you could host something on your LAN using, for example, a
Raspberry Pi. To get access from outside that network, you could use some sort
of VPN/proxy/tunneling, or you could host another instance with a hosting
provider and sync the two.

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partiallypro
Google Meeting dial-ins aren't working for this reason, I suppose. Had a
meeting this morning and no one could dial in or use Hangouts.

------
jedberg
For both the free and paid plans. I look forward to my tens of cents refund!

~~~
sevenf0ur
As a user of the g suite legacy free edition, I'm outraged!

~~~
kinard
Shushhhhh, I've still got my fingers crossed they don't notice us.

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nopriorarrests
Well I get that shit happens, but what is strange about these recent google
incidents is actual downtime. 5 hours for google cloud, and almost 1 hour
already for calendar.

I thought google can do better.

------
FrankSansC

      Not Found
      Error 404
    

Yep, same issue here (France).

~~~
hackerbrother
Same in Wisconsin

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daw___
Intermittent 404/200 in Italy.

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eatonphil
Intermittent 404s and 500s in NYC.

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ilmiont
I don't use Calendar but was able to spam F5 and after a few times, you seem
to get in.

About 1 in 15 times I'm managing to load it at the moment.

Looks like some instances are live; but capacity is evidently a fraction of
what it should be.

------
kyrra
I assume the mobile app is still working for people? (Mine is)

~~~
tootie
Probably cached?

------
hlusa
It first exhibited a lot of blank calendar pages for the end of 2019 onward,
though June and July 2019 were still there. Then complete 404.

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sidcool
Yep, both consumer and Gsuite calendars are down.

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SamiG28
Google Calendar down in Malta too. Same 404.

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rglover
That explains why I couldn't book my client's appointment. API is throwing
"503 Backend Error."

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nontekuser
Non-technical user here: why does Google make me use Captcha if it doesn't
work? Error 503, etc. afterwards.

~~~
hknd
It's ddos protection.

Probably a lot of users are trying to refresh calendar right now (which will
probably hit the calendar service).

If they put ddos protection in front of it, it won't hit the calendar service
but the ddos-protection-service.

------
Vancano
404 in the UK.

~~~
sidcool
Same from India.

------
IceyEC
Seems like the whole backend is down as meet.google.com isn't showing
scheduled meetings either

------
jlis
Also not available in Germany.

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shantanujoshi
YEAH BABY 404's DAY OFF

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smpetrey
404's 503's aside, should we speculate as to what the issue is?

~~~
sp332
Yes, wildly.

------
nopriorarrests
Almost 2 hours down. What a way to discontinue another product, Google!

------
arvinsim
Thought something was wrong with Fantastical. It was Google then.

------
hlusa
First months after July disappeared, then it went 404 in NY area.

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DebraP
When is Google calendar expected to become available again?

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senorsmile
Came here to confirm it's not just me! Still down.

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sequoia
Anyone notice that they do not use recaptcha for this page? Apparently old
fashioned skewed text works fine to protect google's own services from bots!

------
zealsham
I hope it’s not the work of bughunters

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halfmatthalfcat
Rough past couple of weeks for Google.

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donum
404 in Germany

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hknd
Looks like it's back up for me

~~~
hknd
Calendar is loading, but not my events o_O

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RandomGuyDTB
404s here in Maine at 11:02a.

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tmacro
Down in the bay area as well

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gadrev
404 Spain

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thecodeboy
404 from India as well.

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faeyanpiraat
404 in Hungary aswell

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draxofavalon
404 in Argentina too

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thecodelebowski
404 in Canada too.

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TeMPOraL
404 in Poland too.

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Unknoob
404 in Brazil too

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rahuldottech
404 in India too

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DebraP
When does Google expect the calendar to become available?

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telmook
Why no server backup best practices? There should be 2ndary and tertiary
servers ready instantly.

~~~
etskinner
2 explanations I can think of: \- This is a backend failure, where all those
servers that put together your calendar data and serve it to you as a webpage
all use the same database/backend, which is having some sort of error. \- The
code that runs on those servers has a bug. They are all at or near the same
version, so they all fail. Manual intervention needed to diagnose and fix the
bug.

------
Daniel_sk
Instagram is down too, coincidence?
([https://downdetector.com/status/instagram](https://downdetector.com/status/instagram))

~~~
hknd
works for me :|

------
simonhamp
OP: Might be worth removing the link URL from this post so that we don't
hammer their servers while they're trying to fix it for us.

~~~
joshstrange
Is this a joke? I seriously doubt the HN traffic is even 0.1% of people
banging refresh right now.

~~~
floatingatoll
You’re probably right about the traffic, but there’s no need to be
unkind/sarcastic about it. I wish more people thought not to link down
services.

~~~
monkeydata
yeh... but, we sorta live and die by the evidence. We can't just blindly
assume OP is correct. Thankfully, OP knew that and saved us the hassle or
typing it ourselves.

