Google services took everyone by utter surprise when most of them stopped working on the 14 of December. Services like Gmail, YouTube, Google Meet, etc, suffered disruption.
Why Google went down on December 14?
The company has come out with a rather unexpected explanation, saying that the trouble happened due to “an internal storage quota issue.” Some have summarized that Google faced a kind of storage deficiency, but that is not entirely true. However, Google has tried to say that the company’s tools that enabled an efficient allocation of storage space for multiple services did not work as expected.
A spokesperson from the company has stated that the error was an “authentication system outage.” This is because the faulty element in question was responsible for authenticating the different services like Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Drive, and Calendar. People should not relate the situation to running out of storage on an SSD or HDD.
Instead, the issue was that Google servers — which, in the analogy, would be your computer — could not authenticate the process of storage allocation. Ideally, the internal should have allocated more storage to each service, making it run without any trouble. Because this did not happen, the “internal storage quota issue” came into existence.
It must be considered that Google took around 45 minutes to fix the issue and bring things back to normalcy.
This is one of the biggest and widest outages Google products have witnessed in recent times. Because the blackout had affected core services, devices powered using Google Assistant also had some trouble functioning normally.
Devices like Nest Home Hub and Nest Audio had stopped working. In some cases, users had to wait until the services came back online to switch their smart lights back on, says a few anecdotes found on Twitter.
Since the outage was relatively longer, users had come with temporary solutions to access some services. It was suggested that users could still access services that did not require signing in by using the Private modes on Google Chrome and other browsers.
According to the company, the outage lasted for approximately 45 minutes, starting at 3:47 AM PT and ending at 4:32 AM PT. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that some services were quicker to recover than others.
