Almost a shock! The place where you search about every damn thing that strikes your mind goes down for a while. On December 14, 2020, a Google global outage was noticed, and millions of users of Google services such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps were left looking for answers. All these services were rendered unusable for almost an hour and the reason was “internal storage issue.”

It reached the storage limit, and the system failed to distribute the data, causing the services to go down.

“Today, at 3:47 AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue,” the search giant wrote. “The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32 AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future,” it further added.

It was noted that a large number of services that Google offers, such as Gmail, YouTube, Drive, and Calendar, stopped working. Not just Google’s services, the third-party services that used Google’s authentication platform stopped working for those who were trying to log in. However, those who were logged in were not affected by the event.

Also, there is a list of services that stopped working. It includes Google Assistant, which impacts speakers’ working, smart lights, smart light switches, and security cameras for a short time.

Later, the giant said it restored service for the vast majority of its users within an hour after the outage was reported.

“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 5:42 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change,” said an update on Google workplace status dashboard, posted at 5:25 PM IST.

DownDetector.com records whether sites are down or not analyzed Google’s outage. It recorded 1,12,000 issues on YouTube and almost 40,000 on Gmail from people across the world.

What were the results?

Google’s outage brought many companies to question its backend infrastructure, whether it will be able to handle this spike in load, especially those who rely on Google for the backend services will be finding it a major concern. Many of the professionals and companies took to social media to share their frustration with the giant’s outage.