Google reveals why Gmail, YouTube, other Google services went offline for nearly an hour today

Google has formally acknowledged and fixed the global system outage that affected Gmail, YouTube, and other major Google services, forcing them to go offline for nearly an hour on Monday. The global search engine giant has revealed the reason why this happened while also promising it would ensure something like this will not happen again.

In India, the outage appeared to have started just around 5:00PM, according to Down detector and the tracking website was evidently, very nearly bang on the money.

The way the things had panned out, and the way that Google services were inaccessible for a large of number of people around the world, initially seemed to suggest the issue was related to Google accounts, rather than with the Google services themselves. This is because some users were able to access some of these Google services in incognito and/or if they were not signed in. Turns out, that was indeed the case.

“Today, at 3.47AM PT (5:17PM IST) 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 (6:02PM IST). All services are now restored,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement sent over email. “We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

Google has probably some of the most widely used services. Its video sharing platform YouTube, for instance, is said to clock over 2 billion logins each month. More than 12,000 YouTube users globally, including those in the US and India, were affected by Monday’s outage. One can’t stress enough about the inconvenience users might have faced when its more popular work and chat apps like Google Meet suddenly stopped working for hundreds of thousands of users all at the same time.