Google services global outage: Company blames ‘internal storage quota issue’

Google’s services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and others, faced a global outage earlier today. The company blamed an ‘internal storage quota issue’ for the same. The outage lasted almost 45 minutes across all Google services with users unable to login. Most of the services are now back online. Users faced problems with all Google services, and were unable to access Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs during the global outage.

Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard showed an outage for all services. In an official 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 apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

According to the Google dashboard, the problem appears to have started at 5.25 pm for Gmail. It looks like the problems with Gmail continued for a while, even as others services were back. According to the dashboard page, “The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behaviour.”

When Google’s services go down, billion of users are impacted. That’s because Gmail, YouTube have more than a billion users on a monthly basis. Some users reported seeing a 503 error when they tried to login to their Gmail account. Others saw a 500 error when they try to open Gmail. Some even saw a message saying their Google account could not be found.

When we tried opening YouTube, it said ‘Something went wrong’ and a picture of a monkey holding a wrench. Some people were also kicked out of their ongoing Google Meet sessions, and others were unable to join scheduled calls. Google Meet is the video-conferencing tool from the company.