Users from various countries around the world — from Canada to Japan and India — are reporting Google outages. Downdetector, a service that tracks access issues and outages of various internet resources, reports problems in Europe, Asia, parts of the United States, and Russia.
The outages began around 15:00 Moscow time and are still ongoing. There have been no official comments on the causes of the outages yet.
Space weather of the past 24 hours could have influenced access. At the end of May 30, the Sun again showed excessive activity. According to the IA "TASS" in the Heliogeophysical Service of the Institute of Applied Geophysics (FSBI "IPG"), a magnetic storm was expected to begin on Earth from May 31, with a power capable of rising to the level of G3 (strong), on a scale of five indicators, where G1 is weak, and G5 is extreme. The last two levels are capable of affecting the operation of power grids on Earth and satellites.
A new flare was recorded on the Sun today at 14:20 Moscow time. The FSBI "IPG" told IA "TASS" that it affected the operation of communications.
On May 31, at 14:20 Moscow time, an M1.0 flare with a duration of 24 minutes was recorded in the X-ray range. The flare was accompanied by a disruption of shortwave radio communications.
Anomalous solar activity has been observed since the beginning of May. The magnetic storms at the end of the first ten days of May were even recognized as the largest in a century by the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
On May 13-14, a new series of X-class flares occurred. They were a thousand times stronger than usual. After such solar activity, several Starlink system satellites were unable to operate normally, and American businessman Elon Musk, the owner of the system's developer company, again suspected Russia of trying to jam Starlink.
Read more on the topic:
Magnetic anomalies, coronal mass ejections: it became known how space weather affects satellites