Following a major worldwide outage that lasted 45 minutes, Google services have been fully restored.
Last night, Google experienced what it described as “an authentication system outage”, which saw all of its services—including YouTube, Gmail, Drive, Maps, and Photos—go offline for close to an hour.
Google confirmed in a statement that it had resolved the issue, with the Google Workspace Status Dashboard also confirming all services are back up and running.
“Today [December 14, 2020], at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue,” Google said.
“This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored.”
Google added that services that required users to log-in experienced high error rates during the period. It apologised to everyone affected by the issue, and said it would conduct a thorough follow-up review “to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future”.
According to Techradar, fears had emerged that the issue may have been caused by a cyber-attack. However, Google confirmed it was down to a fault generated by an accounting system.
Google has now disabled the offending system and is conducting an investigation.
In addition, outage monitoring website DownDetector reported that more than 12,000 YouTube users had been affected by the outage across the world, including in the United States, Britain and India.
As reported by Reuters, outages on certain Google apps are not uncommon, but Monday’s outage affected all of Google’s popular services, including Hangouts, Chats and Meet, products that people have come to rely on during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Featured image source: iStock/400tmax
