Google outage
Date: 16 December 2020 Tags: IT, Mobile & ComputersIssue
Most Google services, including gmail and Youtube, across the globe suffered a mass outage lasting over an hour on Monday.
Background
The issue is critical as across the world, businesses and other critical services use free and paid Google products for a host of reasons.
Details
-
Google has attributed the outage to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period.
-
Google first acknowledged there was an issue in relation to Gmail, and for some time, the status page showed red for most services.
-
It is 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.
Significance of such events
-
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.