With the reach of Google and service of the scale, it is now mountingly unusual to view an outage that hits all users and services. This is since users are hosted over various servers all over the world.
A lot of Google services, from YouTube to Google Drive to Gmail, sustained a majority outage continuing more than an hour on Monday. All over the world, users mentioned they were not able to access their emails or were signed out of Google Meet sessions suddenly.
While the tech giant Google repaired all services in an hour of the blackout, by then, the crash had turned out to be one of the most crucial social media innovations — and sent alarm streams across companies in various parts of the globe.
What Exactly Happened?
Google representatives attributed the blackout of “around 45 minutes” to “an internal storage quota issue”.
The report said “services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period”. “All services are now restored”, it said, confessing to everyone impacted and ensuring a “thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
Google first recognized there was a problem in connection to Gmail, and for some period, the status page displayed red for a lot of services.
An update said on the Google Workspace status dashboard, published at 5.25 PM IST, “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.”
Around 6.22 PM, the company had updated that “problems with Gmail should be resolved for the vast majority of affected users”. Till then several Google services were back online.
It originally said, “system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better”.
This is crucial, as all over the world, organizations and other delicate services use free, as well as paid Google products for numerous reasons. A one-hour blackout amid a workday is not going to go down well, particularly with paid users.
How Many Services and Users Were Affected?
Image Source: Google
With the reach of Google and service of the scale, only YouTube and Gmail collectively have more than 3.5 billion worldwide users, it is now growingly unusual to view an outage that influences all services, as well as users.
Since users, even from one geography, are hosted on different servers across the worldwide. Even on these given servers, some backups stimulate instantly if anything goes wrong.
Nevertheless, the Monday outage wasn’t actually localized and was among the more comprehensive ones encountered in the latest times. At its zenith, DownDetector.com registered more than 1,12,000 problems on YouTube and around 40,000 for Gmail from folks in several parts of the globe.
The outage gets significance provided that there has been a rush in users all over the online services, and surely in those given by Google. There will be queries inquired on if the backend infrastructure of these organizations is powerful adequately to resist this spike in load over a wide period.
Businesses that rely on Google for backend solutions will be concerned about the repercussions of such outages, primarily a longer one.
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