If you tried to use Google's Gemini AI on Wednesday morning, you might have run into an error message or two. If so, don't worry, it's not just you: Gemini appears to be down for a number of users (myself included). Even if you don't personally use Gemini, you can see the issues from Downdetector, which compiles user reports of downtime across apps, sites, and services. (Disclosure, Lifehacker parent company Ziff Davis also owns Downdetector.)
As of this article, Downdetector is showing thousands of user reports, starting at roughly 6:19 a.m. ET. The reports started small, but began ramping up as the morning continued, jumping sharply after 8 a.m. My guess is that workers on the East Coast started trying to use Gemini this morning, and quickly ran into problems—some of whom ran to Downdectector to report. Google's official Workspace status page also lists an "incident" with Gemini, which it says started at 10:26 a.m. UTC (6:26 a.m. ET).
What do you think so far?
As of 11:10 a.m ET, Google still hasn't fixed the issue. The company posted an update to its status page, confirming that users are seeing “Something Went Wrong” errors on Gemini's macOS, iOS, Android, and web apps, as well as with Gemini in Chrome. While the cause of the issue isn't clear, Google will likely have Gemini back up and running shortly. These outages happen from time to time, to companies big and small. Barring some catastrophic issue, or a widespread problem with a cloud hosting provider, Gemini should be operational sometime this morning. But if anything changes for the worse, I'll keep this article updated.
