Google suffered a global outage on Monday night, causing annoyance to people using services like Gmail, YouTube, Drive, among others. The sudden outage puzzled most people, including Google, which took a while to figure out what went wrong with its various services. Finally, Google has an answer. Google says that the outage was caused by an “internal storage quota issue,” which is not as simple as it sounds.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson told India Today Tech that its services experience what is an “authentication system outage” for approximately 45 minutes due to such internal storage quota issue. To simplify this, the Google spokesperson explained, the internal tools the company uses to allocate enough storage to each service that handles authentication did not work as expected. Once the storage limit was exhausted, the system was unable to automatically make more storage available, causing the system to crash.
Think of it as the situation where your computer’s hard drive runs out of storage space and suddenly everything that is running on your system starts to crash. All devices and services need storage to function, but if none is available, the system simply stops working. Most Google services rely on authentication before a user enters Google servers and when the storage indicator tool did not acquire more space, the authentication tools stopped working.
A large number of services that Google offers, such as Gmail, YouTube, Drive, and Calendar, instantly stopped working. Not just Google services, third-party services using Google’s authentication platform stopped working for users trying to log in. However, people who had already logged in were not affected.
Now if you followed everything that caused the outage, you may have seen solutions that some people managed to figure out. One of the solutions was to access YouTube and some other services in the incognito mode of the browser. Several users said that they were able to log into Google services using the incognito window. Google’s storage quota problem explains this solution.
So when people tried to access YouTube within the private window, they were watching the sessionless version of the video streaming platform. A sessionless version of a website does not need authentication, so it continued to work when Google’s authentication platform stopped working. However, services like Gmail that necessarily need you to log in to access content might not work even within the incognito mode of different browsers.
The outage affected smart devices that need the Google Assistant to function. For example, Nest speakers, smart lights, smart light switches, and security cameras were briefly turned off. The impact was so intense that people had to sit in the dark because Internet-connected services stopped working. Joe Brown has said on Twitter that he had to sit in the dark in his toddler’s room because the lights controlled by Google Home throughout the house stopped working.
Google Home is the first generation smart speaker that is controlled by voice and with the help of the Google Assistant. The speaker necessarily lets you control things like smart lights, smart fans, security cameras, and other internet-connected devices with the Google Assistant, which was one of the services that stopped working for some time during today’s outage. Since Assistant is the primary service that controls smart devices, the outage affected the smart lights in Brown’s home.
