On 14th of December 2020, around 4pm google and other google services such as YouTube, google drive, and Gmail stopped working for 45 minutes to an hour. According to the sources, first report came at 4 PM PST. During these 45 minutes about 3 to 3.5 billion users were affected.
By Sayyed Shehzer Abbas
On this day google faced its biggest technical issue ever. To explain what actually happened Google gave an official explanation and gave this issue a technical slang “A storage quota issue”. It further said that “approximately 45 minutes were caused as services require user to log in experienced high error rate at this period”. Furthermore, Google then apologized to whoever got effected and made a promise, “thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in future”.
The Google eco-system went down shortly after Gmail stopped working. When trying to access Gmail it showed “temporary error () (500)”. Google was aware of that issue and gave statement “We are 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 14/12/2020 12:12 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change”
At 6:22 PM when google services started to restore, Google again stated that “Gmail services have already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future”
Power outages were a common thing but when companies like Google, Facebook, and many others became larger, building complex networks of interconnected data centers around the world, these incidents are quite rare. Google has its very own privately financed undersea cables, so this kind of incident was unexpected by many.
Due to current pandemic going on, everyone is connected through internet, so the outage of google and its services effected a large amount of audience.