Google outage, explained: What really happened, and what is the impact?

 

Google’s services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and others, faced a global outage earlier today. The company blamed an ‘internal storage quota issue’ for the same. The outage lasted almost 45 minutes across all Google services with users unable to login. Most of the services are now back online. Users faced problems with all Google services, and were unable to access Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs during the global outage.

What happened on Monday?

A Google spokesperson attributed the outage of “approximately 45 minutes” to “an internal storage quota issue”. The statement said “services requiring users to log inexperienced high error rates during this period”. “All services are now restored”, it said, apologizing to everyone affected and promising a “thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

Google first acknowledged there was an issue in relation to Gmail, and for some time, the status page showed red for most services. “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 5:42 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change,” said an update on the Google Workspace Status dashboard, posted at 5.25PM IST.

By 6.22 PM, Google had updated that “problem with Gmail should be resolved for the vast majority of affected users”. By then most other Google services were also back online.

It initially said, “system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better”. This is critical, as, across the world, businesses and other critical services use free and paid Google products for a host of reasons. A one-hour outage in the middle of a workday will not go down well, especially with paid users.

Were all services and users affected?

With a service of the scale and reach of Google — just Gmail and YouTube together have over 3.5 billion global users — it is now increasingly rare to see an outage that affects all services and users. This is because users, even from single geography, are hosted over multiple servers across the world. And even on these servers, there are backups that act quickly if something goes wrong.

However, the Monday outage was not really localised, and was among the larger ones experienced in recent times. At its peak, DownDetector.com recorded over 1,12,000 issues on YouTube and almost 40,000 for Gmail from users in different parts of the world.