Yahoo Finance Google services outage hits users across the world
WATCH: Google experiences massive outage
Several of Google’s (GOOGL) services including Gmail and YouTube were down for users around the world around noon UK time on Monday.
The tech giant told Yahoo Finance in an emailed statement that “Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue.”
“Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
When trying to access the popular email app, many users were faced with the following error: “We’re sorry, but your account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.”
Some users also saw the message: “The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.”
On YouTube the error message simply said: “Something went wrong...” accompanied by a picture of a monkey holding a hammer.
Despite what appeared to be a widespread outage that could impact millions of users, initially Google's service dashboard for its services reported no errors. Later Google’s dashboard said:
“We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 12:12 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”
This message appeared for all of its services, including Chat, Hangouts and Groups.
Why Google’s outage is a huge deal
Google’s services going down is a huge issue for companies as many businesses rely on the tech giant’s services for basic work apps such as email, calendars, and its version of Documents and Excel (Sheets).
Adam Leon Smith, chair of the British Computer Society, said the outage could encourage many organisations to review their agreements with Google, realising they were dependent on one provider for services "completely outside of their control."
“Our dependency on technology has grown so much, but the amount spent on reliability, testing and quality hasn’t grown in parallel," he said.
He added: “People are sat in the dark unable to turn on their lights controlled by Google Home. My last two meetings have been unable to use the planned slides as they are stored in Google Slides.”
And Antony Edwards, COO of Eggplant, an intelligent testing and monitoring company, noted that an “instant access economy now means that consumers and businesses no longer have patience for outages and other performance issues.”
“Similarly, the ubiquitous nature of smartphones has significantly increased consumers’ expectations for constant connectivity. Consumers will settle for nothing less than fast, reliable and efficient app access,” he added.
Some users later reported being able to access their Gmail accounts via "incognito mode" — which does not store a log of the users' browsing activity.
Other users said that Google Docs continue to work if you had already synced documents offline.
Google has encountered large-scale outages like this before. In June 2019, issues with Google’s Cloud service that powers apps other than just Google’s own web services, were down for four hours. Not only did it affect Google's services, it impacted other apps such as Snapchat, Nest, and Discord.
The website Downdetector, which monitors when users report having problems on websites in real-time, showed a spike in YouTube, Gmail, Google and Google Duo around noon UK time.
Google Drive, the Android Play Store and Google Maps also appeared to be impacted.
According to an outage map, Europe appeared to be the worst-hit region as was Japan, some parts of Malaysia and Indonesia as well as some regions on the east coast of the US and Brazil.
