Google and its applications suffer outage

Recently a huge outage hit Google and many applications owned by Google, causing popular platforms such as Gmail, Youtube and Google Docs to become unavailable.

Comments from the company

A Google spokesperson has released the following statement about the outage:

Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32am PT. All services are now restored.

Google first blamed the glitch in the identity management module for the outage. The main cause seemed to be in what Google calls the automated quota management system, which reduced the processing power for the identity management system, causing it to return errors globally. What exactly this means in reality is that Google could not verify that a user request was authenticated, and so always returned an error.

Total downtime

The services were down for about an hour total. This outage impacted even the market leading to a short dip in stock market valuation for the company Alphabet which is the parent company to Google.

Far reaching integration

It may be impossible to say exactly how far reaching the outage was but it reveals the depth of integration with this company and how much western countries rely on these services. For example, smart home gadgets that use  Google assistant and also third party applications that use Google’s back end services for authentication all were hit with problems.

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