Google’s services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs, Analytics, and others, faced a global outage earlier today (December 14, 2020). As per a statement issued by the company, there was an ‘internal storage quota issue’ for the same. The outage lasted for almost about 45 minutes across all Google services with users unable to login. While most of the services are now back online, users encountered problems with all Google services and were unable to access Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs once logged in during the global outage.
In an official statement, a Google spokesperson said, “Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log inexperienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard pointed at an outage for all services. According to Google’s dashboard, the problem seems to have started at 5.25 pm for Gmail. It looks like the problems with Gmail continued for a while, even as other services were back. Additionally, as per the dashboard page, “The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.”
