What Caused Google Services Outage?

A couple days ago Google services suffered a widespread outage which lasted for over an hour. Google users were unable to access Google services such as YouTube, and Gmail, as a mistake with its system for identifying people online. In response to Downdetector, the issue seemed to have affected Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Hangouts and Google Meets.

Downdetector, which tracks website outages, reported the problem affected users across the world, but appeared especially widespread in the northeastern U.S., Britain and other parts of Europe. Japan, Malaysia and India also looked to be more affected.

The world’s dependence on Google services led to a truly staggering number of reports on DownDetector, with the number of reported YouTube problems peaking at over 100,000. Some users found YouTube was still functional if they visited it in an incognito browser without signing in. Google Workspace apps like Docs and Meet were also down.

Users also reported that smart home gadgets integrated with Google Assistant were experiencing issues. We verified that a Nest Hub smart display was unable to control a connected smart heater, for example. Third-party apps and services that rely on Google’s back end services, like Pokémon Go, were also hit by problems.

Google has several tools that enable it to verify and track logged-in users. In October, the company began moving those tools to a new file storage system, and in the process misreported portions of the data, according to a Friday post.

That caused several of its services to go down for 47 minutes Monday morning, a rare technical misstep. Google’s explanation comes amid heightened cybersecurity vigilance.

A hack on software provider SolarWinds Corp. has exposed companies including Microsoft Corp. and multiple U.S. government agencies. A Google spokeswoman said on Friday that the internet giant has found no evidence the SolarWinds hack affected Alphabet or Google’s systems.

About 15% of requests sent to Google’s cloud storage service were disrupted during the Monday outage, the company said. The cloud division offers an identification service similar to one from Okta Inc. On Tuesday, Google’s Gmail service had another disruption and the company attributed this to an issue with data migration.