It was a surprise on Monday when #Googledown trended on Twitter for more than one hour. But the real outage for Google and almost all its services across the world was just for 45 minutes.
The company suffered a worldwide downtime, disrupting its online services such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, and Google Maps.
A report from Google reads- “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.”
The authentication system is used to manage how users login to services run by both Google and partners. After apologizing to users, the company promised to do a follow-up review to ensure such issues don’t happen in the future.
The error seen on Gmail said- Temporary Error – We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable.
All at once, such hashtags as #Googledown, #Gmail, #YouTubeDOWN started to trend on Twitter. Other Google-connected devices affected were Nest and Home speakers.
Promptly, the company informed users that it is well aware of what was going on as many could not access their account. YouTube also acknowledged the situation and claimed they were working on the issue.
There was a previous snag with Google services in August when many users had problems login into their accounts on Gmail and using Drive or Docs. At that time, thousands of Google users also flocked to social media to complain that they couldn’t use their accounts. During the outage, users could not download email attachments, they also could not use Meet, Groups, Chat, and Voice services.
An insider claimed that the outage was so severe that it disrupted internal tools that engineers use internally for communication didn’t work, so the recovery process was a bit harder.
