On Monday, Google services experienced a mass blackout lasting over an hour, from Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive. Users around the globe complained that they were unable to enter emails or were logging out of Google Meet sessions on an ongoing basis. By then though Google restored all services within an hour of the disruption, the collapse had become one of the greatest phenomena in social media and sent panic waves through corporations in many parts of the globe.
Why did the blackout take place?
The outage of “approximately 45 minutes” was attributed by a Google spokesperson to “an internal storage quota issue.” The statement said “services requiring users to log in experienced 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.”
About Gmail, Google first recognized a challenge, and for some time, the status page displayed red for most services. An update on the Google Workspace Status dashboard, posted at 5.25 PM IST said that They’re aware of a Gmail problem that concerns most people. The users affected are unable to use Gmail. By 12/14/20, 5:42 PM, they will have an update outlining when they plan to address the problem. They also informed that it is an approximation of this resolution period that may alter.
Google updated at 6.22 PM that for the vast majority of affected users, the problem with Gmail should be solved.” The bulk of other Google sites were already back available by then.
Initially, it said, “Google’s top priority is system reliability, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.” This is critical since, for a host of reasons, corporations and other critical utilities around the globe need free and paid Google goods. A one-hour outage in the middle of a workday, especially with paying users, would not go down well.
Have all programs and consumers been impacted?
It is becoming extremely unusual to see an outage that impacts all networks and customers with a website of the size and reach of Google-only Gmail and YouTube have over 3.5 billion global users combined. This is because users are hosted through numerous servers across the globe, often from single geography. And there are copies also on these servers that activate easily if anything goes wrong.
This blackout, how critical is it?
Given that there has been an uptick in users across all web platforms, and undoubtedly in those provided by Google, the outage gains significance. Questions will be asked on whether these businesses’ backend infrastructure is robust enough to handle this surge in load for a large period of time, too. Companies relying on Google for backend services would be concerned about the effect of such an interruption, especially a long one.
