Google’s services which includes Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and others faced a global outage recently. The company blamed an ‘internal storage quota issue’ for the same. The outage continued for around 45 minutes among all Google services where users were unable to login. Many services were back online later. Users were facing problems with Google services and were not able to access Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs during the outage.
Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard was showing an outage of all services. In an official statement, Google spokesperson said that at around 3:47AM PT, Google experienced an authentication system outage for around 45 minutes because of an internal storage quota issue. Services that required users to log in experienced high error rates at this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. The services were restored and Google apologized to the affected users and said that they will conduct a thorough follow up review to make sure that the problem does not occur again in the future.
The Google dashboard states that the problem appears to have started at 5:25pm for Gmail. The problems of Gmail continued for some time and even as others services were back. The dashboard page also said that the affected users have been able to access Gmail but were getting to see error messages, high latency and other unexpected behaviour.
When services of Google faced outage, many users were impacted. It was because Gmail, YouTube have more than billion users on a monthly basis. A few users also reported seeing a 503 error when they tried to login to their Gmail account. A few others were able to see a 500 error when they tried to open Gmail. Some also saw a message which said that Google account could not be found.
A few users said that when they tried to open YouTube, it said ‘Something went wrong’ and a picture of monkey appeared holding a wrench. A few were also kicked out of their ongoing Google Meet sessions and a few others were not able to join scheduled calls. Google Meet is a video-conferencing tool from Google.