Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Drive, faced a mass outage on Monday (December 14). The outage lasts for an hour and affected Google worldwide users. During the outage, millions of Google users were unable to access e-mail or Youtube.
A Google spokesman said, “about 45 minutes” outage was due to “internal storage quota issues.” The statement says, “services that require users to log inexperienced a high error rate during this period.” “All services now been restored,” he said, apologizing to everyone affected and promising “a thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem does not recur in the future.”
Shortly after the outage, Google said that Gmail was facing a problem, and the status page was showing a red color for most services for a few minutes. Affected users can’t access Gmail. We’ll provide an update detailing when we hope to resolve the issue. Please note that these turnaround times are approximate and subject to change,” said an update on Google’s Workspace Status dashboard, which was posted at 5.25 pm IST.
At 6:22 p.m., Google has updated that “the problem with Gmail should be resolved for most of the affected users.” On that occasion, most Google services also started functioning normally.
Initially, he said, “system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are constantly making improvements to make our systems better.”
It’s noting that Gmail and YouTube together have more than 3.5 billion global users and the outage affects all of these users, which means the problem isn’t small.
Experts argue that the outages that were witnessed on Monday were not localized and were the larger ones that were experienced recently. At its peak, DownDetector.com recorded more than 1,12,000 issues on YouTube and nearly 40,000 for Gmail.
Google needs to solve this problem because there has been a surge in users across all online services and Google services are popular among netizens. Experts question whether Google’s backend infrastructure is robust enough to handle the surge in load.