Opinion

Explained: Google Outage And Its Potential Impact

Even after Google outage, Google maintains that system reliability is its top priority.

It was for the first time in the history of search engine giant Google that its services became inaccessible on Monday, December 14.

Most of the Google services, from Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive, suffered a mass outage which lasted over an hour.

Users, across the globe, complained of inability to access emails. Some were logged out of ongoing Google Meet sessions.

What Exactly Caused The Massive Google Outage?

According to a statement of Google, the outage of “approximately 45 minutes” was due to “an internal storage quota issue.” The statement confirmed, “Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period.”

However, the statement reaffirmed ‘All services are now restored”. While apologizing to everyone affected, Google promised a “thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”

There were problems reported with Gmail earlier as well. However, Google had maintained that it resolved those issues. However, hundreds of users continued to post on social media about their inability to access Gmail.

Google, on the other hand, maintains that system reliability is its top priority and they are consistently improving their services.

Gmail, Youtube, Google down Massive server outage causes ruckus globally - Digpu News

Were All Google Services And Users Affected?

With a service of the scale and reach of Google – just Gmail and YouTube together have over 3.5 billion global users – it is now increasingly rare to see an outage that affects all services and users.

This is because users, even from a single geographic region, are hosted over multiple servers across the world. And even on these servers, there are backups that activate quickly if something goes wrong.

Reliability of Google Services Questioned:

The outage gains importance given that there has been a surge in users across all online services, and certainly in those offered by Google.

There have already been questions asked on whether the backend infrastructure of tech-giants like Google are strong enough to withstand this spike in load, that too over a large period of time.

The companies that depend on Google for backend services are more worried about the impact of such an outage. This is a serious concern, given the mass adoption of online services amid the pandemic.

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Aasif Ganaie

Aasif is a journalist and a news enthusiast based in Jammu & Kashmir. He voyages to explore and uncover the stories More »

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