Google explains why Youtube, Gmail, and other services faced an outage on 14th December

2020 had everything, including a very recent huge google outage. Many Google services like Youtube, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Gmail faced a shutdown on 14th December. This outage lasted around 45 minutes. People were unable to use the services or even log in to the various portals. In their statement, Google said “Today, at 3.47 AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log inexperienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32 AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

Now, Google has come out with a reason behind this outage. The main reason blamed an ‘internal storage quota issue’ for the same. They further added that “as part of an ongoing migration of the User ID Service to a new quota system, a change was made in October to register the User ID Service with the new quota system, but parts of the previous quota system were left in place which incorrectly reported the usage for the User ID Service as 0.”

They also stated that problems started to appear first at 5.25 pm for Gmail. This was a major event in the world of technology. Google does not help users only as a search engine but all of its other services are used by almost everyone. Whether it’s any of the government agency, corporates or any other individual/organisation, everyone takes services of Google in some or other way. All of their operations were affected during these 45 minutes.

Google and Youtube have billions of users and all of them were affected. Some of the users saw a 503 error or 500 error. Few of them also noticed a message displaying that their account was not found. Some of the reports also mentioned that over 40,000 outage cases were reported around the world in nearly 10 minutes since the outage. During the pandemic, people are highly reliant on video conferencing apps. One of those important applications is Google Meet which stopped working as well. People were logged out of the meeting and were not able to get back in.