Table of Contents
OUTAGE
- Most Google services, from Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive, suffered a mass outage lasting over an hour on Monday.
- Across the world, users complained they were unable to access emails or were logged out of ongoing Google Meet sessions.
What happened on Monday?
- A Google spokesperson attributed the outage of “approximately 45 minutes” 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, apologising to everyone affected and promising a “thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
Were all services and users affected?
- With a service of the scale and reach of Google — just Gmail and YouTube together have over 3.5 billion global users — it is now increasingly rare to see an outage that affects all services and users.
- This is because users, even from a single geography, are hosted over multiple servers across the world. And even on these servers, there are backups that activate quickly if something goes wrong.
How important is this outage?
- The outage gains importance given that there has been a surge in users across all online services, and certainly in those offered by Google.
- There will be questions asked on whether the backend infrastructure of these companies are strong enough to withstand this spike in load, that too over a large period of time. Companies that depend on Google for backend services will be worried about the impact of such outage, especially a longer one.
Latest Burning Issues | Free PDF
WhatsApp