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Earlier this week, Google suffered a major (albeit short-lived) outage that brought down all of its online services. At the time we had no idea what caused the problem, but Google has investigated it and now has some answers.
Apparently, the problem was due to the reduction of the capacity of Google’s storage systems, which ended up blocking any service that requires users to log in; are almost all of them.
Google has posted preliminary details of the outage on its blog, naming the issue “Incident 20013 of Google Cloud Infrastructure Components. “It turns out that the automated storage management system suffered a problem that reduced the capacity of Google’s authentication system.
That problem then affected all the systems that required login details, in particular, Google’s cloud platform and Google’s workspace. Most people will have been affected by the latter, as Workspace is the service behind Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Drive, etc.
“The main cause was an issue in our automated quota management system that reduced the capacity of Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally,” Google explained. “As a result, we were unable to verify that user requests were authenticated and it delivered errors to our users.”
Unfortunately, this was not the only outage Google has suffered this week, and only yesterday (December 15) Gmail went down at 4:30 pm ET. Not all users were affected, but those who did suffered from error messages, email bouncing, high latency, and other issues. Normal service did not resume until around 7pm ET. What caused this latest outage and why it only affected Gmail is still unknown.
Fortunately, knowing the details of Monday’s outage means Google can hopefully take action so it doesn’t happen again. Because in a world where we all depend on Google services, be it in the workplace or at home, we can’t deal with all these server-side issues that keep us from getting things done.
