Gemini Outage Mostly Resolved: What Went Wrong for Google's AI

Google confirmed Wednesday evening that a widespread outage affecting its Gemini AI assistant in Google Workspace had been mostly resolved. The company said at 6 p.m. PT that all affected users should be able to access the service, according to its Workspace Status Dashboard. The disruption began earlier Wednesday and prevented users from accessing Gemini features in apps including Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and the Gemini app across web, MacOS, iOS, Android and Chrome platforms. DownDetector recorded more than 1,600 user reports during peak hours. Users encountered error codes 1099 and 1076 with messages stating "Something went wrong." Google said in a final status update that preliminary analysis showed the issue was triggered by a performance problem in its backend database that impacted retrieval of the Gemini App tools catalog. Engineers fixed the problem by optimizing load distribution across the database. Gemini App Vice President Josh Woodward posted on X at 10:31 a.m. PT that some fixes were deployed with more coming soon. Google declined to comment further on the cause or prevention measures. Anthropic also reported resolved issues with its Claude Haiku 4.5 model earlier Wednesday.