Google Meet down in India: Users left frustrated over meeting access issues; here’s what happened

Google Meet down: On Wednesday, thousands of users in India experienced trouble with Google Meet, the popular video calling and online meeting platform.

Many reported being unable to join meetings especially through the web version. Now this has left professionals and students frustrated in the middle of their scheduled sessions.

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Social media platforms especially X (formerly Twitter) saw a surge of posts from users who shared their frustrations. Some reported seeing a “502 error” when trying to access Google Meet. This hints at temporary server problems.

According to Downdetector, a popular service that tracks outages, around 79% of complaints were related to trouble starting meetings, 16% were about server connection problems, and the remaining 5% concerned issues using the app itself.

So far, over 1,500 reports have been registered about the disruption.

Google Meet: Earlier problems

This is not the first time Google Meet (gmeet) has faced problems this year. Back in September, the platform experienced a significant outage in the United States, affecting more than 15,000 users.

At the time, Google traced the issue to a “recent change in content edge cache” which its engineers later reversed to restore normal service.

Why is Google Meet down in India now?

While Google has not yet released an official statement about the current outage in India, the timing comes shortly after another major tech disruption. Last week, web-infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected several major platforms, including X, Canva, and even ChatGPT.

Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, admitted the company had “failed” its customers and the wider internet when its network issues disrupted significant amounts of online traffic.

Google Meet users in India expressed concern as the platform plays a critical role in remote work, online classes, virtual events. Many are now switching to meeting alternatives like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

On Downdetector over 66% of users reported issues with the website itself. Roughly 32% cited server connection problems.

For now, the platform appears to be partially functional for some users. But others continue to face difficulties.

Experts suggest that temporary outages like these are often caused by internal updates. Some of them even attribute the problem to minor server changes or perhaps unexpected technical glitches.