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From around 1:00 p.m. M., Google services have been inaccessible in numerous countries, including Italy, the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. The home page and some search features were available, but YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Home, Nest, Google Classroom, and pretty much every other service from the Mountain View giant was down. Problems also for the Meet platform used by thousands of students for distance education, which in several cases were interrupted.
Google’s website that logs service outages reports that all of the company’s services have been subject to outages since 7 a.m. in California. “We are aware that many of you are having trouble accessing YouTube at this time; our team is aware of the issue and is investigating it,” the company’s video platform tweeted. “We will update you here as soon as we have more news.”
We are aware that many of you are having trouble accessing YouTube at this time; our team knows and is looking into it. We will update it here as soon as we have more news.
– TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) December 14, 2020
Meanwhile, the first reports from users of a gradual return to normalcy are beginning to reach Twitter, at least for some services. Google has begun to restore its services, affected by a malfunction on a global scale after 12:30 Italian time. In the Google Control Panel, in fact, we read that each service “has already been restored for some users and we expect a resolution shortly for all other users.” The message is from approximately 1:30 pm and follows the one posted at 12:55 pm, in which Google claims to be aware of a “problem that affects the majority of users.”
Following the initial investigation, the outage would be linked to the company’s authentication tools, which manage how users access services managed by both Google and third-party developers. For this reason, even those who use other services have struggled: For example, in Slack, the Salesforce-owned chat app, only people who were already online at the time of the outage could communicate. Tools that don’t work without logging in, such as Gmail and Google Calendar, were not accessible, while YouTube and others could be accessed in “private browsing” mode: this circumstance seems to refer more to an internal error than to agent activity external to Google. Instead, it appears that Google’s cloud activity has not been compromised, which would have otherwise caused many other web services to malfunction.
The blackout affected Google’s Smart Home services, including Google Home smart speakers and Nest thermostats and smoke alarms: During the recession, it was not possible to access services through an app to change their settings.
“The unavailability of Google’s authentication services today, which caused an outage lasting around 90 minutes worldwide, could be related to the prevention and protection measures implemented by the company in light of the recently discovered attack. from one state to dozens of important realities around the world and the US in particular. ” This is the opinion of Andrea Zapparoili Manzoni, an expert in offensive security and cyber defense. In recent hours, several US federal agencies have been targeted by hackers linked to a foreign government, there are suspicions about Russia.
The attack referred to by the expert “has been going on since the beginning of the summer of 2020, is very complex and sophisticated and is preliminarily attributed to the group ‘Cozy Bear’ or APT29”, the same group of supposedly Russian hackers who are believed to have orchestrated a breach by US-based cybersecurity firm FireEye a few days ago, which led to the theft of some sensitive IT tools, “but public analysis on the subject is still quite confusing and fragmented, adds Zapparoli Manzoni. The group of hackers supposedly the same one on which the security agencies of the British and American government launched an alert at the beginning of the summer, because it would have tried to steal information about the coronavirus vaccine. alert triggered by the APT29 attack – he explains – has led Google to review the security of its systems and possibly to reboot them after the checks to suitable. and the application of ad hoc countermeasures, with the result of harming users. If this scenario is verified, we would have a new confirmation of the fragility of the system, which is based for its proper functioning on the assumption that there is no conflict in cyberspace, which unfortunately is inevitable and increasingly widespread ”, concludes Zapparoli Manzoni.
The confirmation came from Google itself: “Today at 3:47 am PT (12:47 Italian time) – he writes – we found an interruption in the authentication system that lasted approximately 45 minutes due to an internal problem with the storage quota . Services that require users to log in encountered a high error rate during that time. The issue was resolved at 4:32 am PT, all services restored. We apologize to all affected users, we will conduct a thorough review to guarantee that it cannot be repeated in the future. ”
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