technology

Google experiences worldwide outage with failure of majority services

Date: December 16, 2020 Nandita Bhardwaj Nandita Bhardwaj
Google experiences worldwide outage with failure of majority services 
Google has reportedly suffered a global outage, with majority of services comprising YouTube, Gmail, and Google Calendar, having recorded failures. Commencing at about 11.50 am GMT, the outages seemed to have largely affected Google’s services, except for search, which operated mostly unimpacted.



The outage follows another incident that saw Amazon witness a significant failure in late November, in which the retailer’s Virginia data center had failed for a period of nearly 90 minutes, bringing down not only Amazon, for most of the users in America, but also several other websites and services dependent on the company’s computing arm, AWS.



According to a Google spokesperson, the Google outage was caused due to a failure in the authentication tools of the company, which are important for managing the way users log in to services that are run by both third-party developers as well as Google. The spokesperson also cited that the company experienced an authentication system outage for an approximate duration of 45 minutes owing to the issue of internal shortage quota.



During this period, services needing users to log in witnessed high error rates. The issue of the authentication system was reportedly resolved at 4.32 am PT and all the services have now been restored, added the spokesperson, stating that Google apologizes to everyone affected and will be carrying out a thorough follow-up review for ensuring that this problem does not occur again in the future.



The outage seriously disrupted services for numerous workplaces. One of the company’s services, Google Suite, not only manages intra-office messaging via Chat and Meet services, but also email communication, and actual work via Google Slides, Sheets, and Docs.



For people working from home, the outage impacted Google’s Smart Home services, comprising Nest thermostats and smoke alarms, as well as Google Home smart speakers. Even though these services are work in a fail-safe mode, users were not be able to access them via an app for making changes to their settings.



Source credit: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/14/google-suffers-worldwide-outage-with-gmail-youtube-and-other-services-down  

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Nandita Bhardwaj

Nandita holds a management degree with specialization in marketing, and boasts of a short-term experience in the field of recruitment. Following her passion for writing however, she decided to pursue a career in the field of content development. Presently, Nandita pens down news pieces for newsorigins.com, spanning the verticals of business, finance, and technology.