Why was Google down? Company blames ‘storage quota issue’ for outage affecting Gmail, Drive and YouTube

A host of services owned by Google became inaccessible for around an hour on Monday, with the company blaming an “internal storage quota issue”.

The problem was short-lived, but affected hundreds of millions of users around the world at a time when many people are working remotely.

Those who rely apps such as Gmail and Google Docs for work or education were left unable to access them, or to use other popular products such as Google Maps.

The issue was linked to user authentication, with services that requiring the user to log in with their Google account entirely inaccessible. Other Google-owned that can be used without signing in, such as YouTube, were available in “incognito mode”.

In a statement released shortly after the outage occurred, the company said: “We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

#googledown

Users around the world began to notice problems around 11.30am, reporting that YouTube was facing problems. The hashtag “#googledown” quickly became one of the top trending terms on Twitter.

While Google’s search engine remained unaffected, Hangouts, Meet and Classroom all suffered from the brief outage, which hampered those who may have been relying on the company’s services to work or teach from home.

When users tried to access emails, documents or log on to any services, they were greeted by an image of a monkey holding a wrench accompanied with the words, “Something went wrong…”

The problem appeared to be widespread across the globe, with DownDetector, a service which collates user-reported accounts of bugs with websites and services, publishing a graphic on its website showing the areas reporting the most problems. The map showed a cluster of reports centred around Europe, as it entered the busiest part of the working day. The outage also occurred just as the earliest rising workers and students on the east coast of America signed on.

No hack evidence

For those who were unable to work because of the failure of the email and documents services, there was no respite in YouTube, with the video streaming giant also failing for users. Also affected were apps and games such as Pokemon Go, and services that required user to log in through Google, such as third-party authentication, such as Slack.

There is no evidence of a “hack” or external attack being responsible.

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