Weird rectangles on all google sites

This morning, suddenly I started to see weird rectangles on all google sites I was using, such as gmail, google calendar…etc

Even worse, this was happening on all browsers. Then I tried some other computers, even my mobile phone… All was showing these weird characters instead of icons.

Some pictures below

I wrote to google support about this but nobody replied after 9 hours. So I got crazy and decided to try something else.

I suddenly realized that I am using PIHOLE in my home and that might block some urls. And those URLs might include site specific fonts.

So I changed my DNS address in my NetworkManager settings to 8.8.8.8 instead of Pihole and voila! Issue fixed.

Then I deep dive into pihole logs, and tried to find what is causing this issue. In the Pihole logs, I found that fonts.gstatic.com is blocked. So I added it to whitelist and voila ! Issue fixed.

I am writing this here so that some other people may benefit from it.