UPDATE: Google: Here’s what caused our big global outage
Multiple Google services including Gmail have gone down across a number of countries today, Monday, December 14.
Just before 7:00am ET, users began reporting that they were unable to access Google search, YouTube, Docs or Gmail, among other services, with Europe and North America reported to be widely impacted.
Image: ZDNet
Google’s service dashboard displayed a message for each of the services affected by the outage, which in the case of Gmail read: “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail.”
All services have since been restored. Google later revealed that the issues were caused by an outage to its authentication platform.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: “Today, at 3.47AM PT 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. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
Owners of Nest thermostats and Google Home smart speakers also reported problems during the outage, meanwhile the Google Cloud Status Dashboard highlighted issues affecting several of Google’s cloud components.
The Downdetector site shows reports of the outage from Gmail customers arriving from across the world, but particularly from Europe and the US East Coast with their high concentrations of computer users.
From just before 7:00 ET, users began reporting that they were unable to access a number of Google services, including Gmail as seen here.
Image: DownDetector
