Gmail Outage: Google explained the reason behind 45-minutes global outage

Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Drive faced a mass outage on Monday (December 14). The outage lasted for around an hour and it affected Google users across the world. During the outage, millions of Google users were unable to access emails or Youtube.

The latest outage is believed to have impacted users in various parts of the world including India.

A Google spokesperson said the outage of “approximately 45 minutes” was due to “an internal storage quota issue”. The statement said “services requiring users to log inexperienced high error rates during this period”. “All services are now restored”, it said, apologizing to everyone affected and promising a “thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

“Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored.” Google was tweeted on yesterday.

Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored.

— Google Cloud (@googlecloud) December 14, 2020

At around 5.25 PM IST, Google – on its Workspace status Dashboard – said, it was “aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users” and that the affected users were unable to access Gmail.

As per the dashboard, other Google services like Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Meet have also been affected.

Downdetector, which detects outages and interruptions on networks, had also shown that services like YouTube (Google’s video platform) and Gmail were facing disruption.

It is to be noted that Gmail and YouTube together have over 3.5 billion global users and the outage affected all these users, which means that the problem was not small.