The Global Outage: The Google’s Nightmare

Yesterday (December 14/20) Google play services, Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive started facing a vast outage. This outage which lasted approximately 45 minutes has affected many Google users across the globe. During this unpredictable outage, millions of Google users were unable to access Google services including Gmail and YouTube.

As per the Google this outage of “about 45 minutes” was due to “an internal storage quota issue”. Google explained it by saying “services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period”. “All services are now restored”, it justified. Google also apologized to every affected user and affirmed a “thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

Timeline of Google Outage on 12/14/20,

1. 5:17 pm IST: Google users started experiencing an authentication system outage.

2. 5.25 PM IST: Google on its Workspace Status Dashboard notifies – it was “aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users

3. 5:42 PM IST: Google announced to provide an update of details about when to expect the resolution of the outage.

4. 6.02 PM IST: Google spokesperson noted that the authentication system issue was resolved and all services are now working normally.

5. 6.22 PM IST: Google updates that “problem with Gmail should be resolved for the vast majority of affected users”.

6. 6.54pm IST: YouTube is now restored after an outage that lasted over an hour. The YouTube team confirmed this via a tweet saying: “We’re back up and running! “

‘Down Detector’ also detected many problem such as people not able to access the services. Downdetector showed over thousand of reported cases from users having issues accessing YouTube. A similar outage was reported on Gmail, Playstore and YouTube.

As per Downdetector claim, over 79 per cent users were facing issues in logging-in while 15 per cent users were not able to access the Google website.

Many of them were unable to login their Google accounts during the outage. Most of them impacted users are said to be coming from Mumbai, Delhi, and Hyderabad. Many in the UK and Germany were also facing the same situation. The YouTube homepage was simply showing a ‘something went wrong’ message.

During the outage, the internet was flooded with memes as net users took to Twitter and other social media sites to make finny discussion on the server outage.

Update:

9.55 pm IST: Google issued a statement explaining that the issue was caused by an internal storage quota issue, and that all services have now been restored.

Whatever the official reason of outage from Google regarding this vast outage, the actual reasons are actually not revealed many times. This may be because firms do not want to smash their reputation. This outage may be later attributed to Russian Hackers or a massive DDoS attack from Russia or even a serious security hole in Google. Who knows for now?

#Google #YouTubeDown #GoogleDown #GmailDown