Google’s services, including Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, and others, faced a global outage on December 14. The company blamed an ‘internal storage quota issue’ for the same. The outage lasted almost 45 minutes across all Google services with users unable to login.
Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard showed an outage for all services. Later, Google Workspace tweeted saying, ‘Thanks for staying with us’. When Google’s services go down, billions of users are impacted. That’s because Gmail, YouTube has more than a billion users on a monthly basis.
Some users reported seeing a 503 error when they tried to log in to their Gmail account. Others saw a 500 error when they try to open Gmail. Some even saw a message saying their Google account could not be found.
When we tried opening YouTube, it said ‘Something went wrong’ and a picture of a monkey holding a wrench.
Some people were also kicked out of their ongoing Google Meet sessions, and others were unable to join scheduled calls. Google Meet is the video-conferencing tool from the company.
“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail,” the statement said, with the word “Gmail” replaced by other services.
This crisis may have been brief it took services offline for less than an hour but it was an unnerving reminder of just how dependent millions of people have become on services in the cloud.
Anyone who tried to open a Google services alert message will be displayed on the screen, “Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
Such failures in Google’s systems are rare, though a problem with some servers caused difficulties for US users in June 2019.
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