After suffering a brief but massive outage, Google has successfully brought the majority of its services online. The successful recovery aside, the disruption of service could be an ominous indicator and warning to errant internet users who rely on Google services.
Google suffered a worldwide outage on Monday. This disrupted several of the company’s online services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Although the services have returned to normal, users should consider the outage an indirect warning about staying within their allocated storage space.
Google’s temporary outage isn’t serious but the repercussions certainly were:
After managing to bring its services to normalcy, Google released a statement offering a reason for this outage. The company claimed an internal storage quota issue caused the outage. Google’s official Twitter handle sent out a Tweet which 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 login experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. All services are now restored.”
Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored.
— Google Cloud (@googlecloud) December 14, 2020
Google’s authentication system is at the very beginning of every interaction a user has with any of the company’s products and services. Essentially, it is a service that manages how users login to services run by both Google and third-party developers.
Google has issued an apology and added that it will “conduct a thorough follow up review” to ensure that such issues don’t recur in the future.
Billions of people around the world rely on Google’s online services – including Gmail and YouTube – and that’s never more apparent than when they go down. https://t.co/GcJWr8xNze
— news.com.au (@newscomauHQ) December 15, 2020
The first service to go down was YouTube. The event quickly caused #YouTubeDOWN to trend on Twitter. Hashtags #Gmail and #googledown quickly followed as other massively used services started to go down.
Monday’s outage is a very grim reminder of just how deeply people integrate Google and its products or services in their everyday lives. Google-connected devices, including Nest and Home speakers, stopped functioning reliably, causing some weird issues for many users at their homes.
Google blaming ‘internal storage quota’ for Monday’s massive service outage is a warning to users?
Incidentally, this is not the first time that Google has experienced a major outage that had ripples across the globe. In August this year, Google users around the world reported problems while accessing Google services including Gmail, Drive, and Docs.
Several hundred thousand users complained about the same on social media. Users also complained Google was throwing them out of their accounts abruptly. Others faced difficulties in sending and downloading email attachments. Others faced intermittent issues with Meet, Groups, Chat, Keep, and Voice services.
Just wondering how much happy the designer would have been yesterday#googledown pic.twitter.com/IvxmBnB9XI
— Ⓡⓐⓗⓤⓛ || Naam toh suna hoga! (@RahulMahato_) December 15, 2020
For the last few days, Google has been sending out emails to its users. The emails warn about data deletion from inactive accounts. Essentially, the search giant is warning its users that it retains the right to delete data from accounts that remain dormant for more than 24 months.
Gmail is down AGAIN! Google’s email service experiences an outage https://t.co/Vml47wBcmk
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) December 15, 2020
Apart from this obvious condition, there’s one more, which should be of higher concern following Monday’s massive outage. Google has indicated it reserves the right to delete data from accounts that have consistently remained over their storage limit for two years.
Google claiming Monday’s outage was due to an internal storage quota issue could be an indirect word of caution. Users who have consistently violated the company’s policies about data quotas should start trimming their virtual fat.