Google Play Store back online after partial outage on web, Android

Google Play was back online after suffering a partial outage on the web and on Android platform on late Wednesday evening.

According to a report by 9To5 Google, the issue started at around 4PM PT on Wednesday (4:30AM IST on Thursday) and peaked at around 6PM PT (6:30AM IST on Thursday) with users seeing error messages on the homescreen tabs for Games, Movies and TV, Apps and Books on Android. In addition to this, users were unable to see the carousel of content recommendations. Users were also unable to see the Updates and the Library for previously purchased and installed apps and games. App recommendations were also impacted in some cases.

The report further says that the Google Play Store on the web faced similar issues.

Notably, despite the partial outage, there were no reports of app downloads or content purchases being impacted.

Down Detector noted a similar spike in issues affecting users in the US, Japan, parts of Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela among others. The issue was resolved at around 7:15PM PT (7:45AM IST on Thursday).

Separately, Google has removed a bunch of 813 “creepware” apps from the Play Store. As per a report by ZDNet, researchers from the New York University, Cornell Tech NortonLifeLock published a paper wherein they analysed top 1,000 apps based on their CreepRank score, which is based on an algorithm that identifies creepware-like behaviour inside mobile apps and then assigns them a score.

Based on their analysis on app data sets from 2017, 2018 and 2019, the researchers found a total of 1,095 creepware apps that accounted for more than one million installs. The researchers informed the company last year and now the company has taken down all those apps from the Play Store.