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It has not been a very good week for Google. After a serious outage that killed all Google services on Monday morning, you also had to deal with another Gmail outage yesterday afternoon (December 15).
Neither cut lasted long, but it leaves us with many questions. For example, what the heck is going on at Google for two serious outages to occur in as many days?
Yesterday’s Gmail outage caused the service to go down at 4.30pm ET. While not all users were affected, a large number of them encountered error messages, bounced emails, high latency, and other similar issues. While the issue was fixed and normal service resumed at 7pm ET, Google hasn’t told us exactly what the cause was.
Fortunately, Monday’s problem isn’t that mysterious, with Google posting preliminary details of the outage on its blog. Called “Google Cloud Infrastructure Components Incident 20013,” it turns out that the problem was with Google’s automated storage management system. It had a problem that reduced the capacity of Google’s authentication system, which means that Google could not know which users were authenticated and which were not.
So that problem happened to interfere with all the systems that required login data, which is practically all. Particularly affected were Google’s own cloud platform and Google’s workspace. Most people would have been affected by problems with 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.”
Fortunately, knowing the details of Monday’s outage and the fact that it fixed last night’s Gmail problems means that Google can hopefully take action so it doesn’t happen again.
