[U: Fixed] Google Meet livestreams are experiencing technical difficulties right now

Update: Fixed as of 11:30 AM UTC (7:30 am EST)

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Some users are reporting odd behavior during their Google Meet livestreams right now, but Google is working to resolve this as soon as possible. Lagging or buffering in the video and audio are plaguing enough meetings that the company updated its Workspace status dashboard to reflect this as an official issue.

As you can see, the status page states that updates will be provided periodically until the service is working as advertised, and the last update was at 7:04 PM UTC. Another update will be provided at 10:00 PM UTC – that’s in about 2 hours as of the time I’m writing this.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen or heard of buffering issues in Meet livestreams, but it’s to be expected now that everyone is pretty much using it for business and such thanks to the pandemic’s influence on the digital world. Adoption of video meetings and virtual sessions have been expedited by at least five years, according to some.

There’s no telling whether or not Meet will work flawlessly come time for the next dashboard notice, but that’s our hope. Millions of people rely on it and are likely holding events as we speak, so it would be a shame if this were to continue into the night and even into tomorrow. Google is usually pretty good about acting quickly for its core services though, so I wouldn’t expect much more trouble. Let us know in the comments if you’ve been affected by this or not!