Google was hit by a major outage on Monday morning.
Per Downdetector , a wide range of Google services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Suite, and Google Maps started experiencing problems at about 6:30 a.m. ET.
TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) December 14, 2020
Google’s Workplace Status Dashboard later confirmed that all of its products were affected. Google’s search engine, however, appeared to keep working throughout.
Downdetector’s data suggested the problem was worldwide, with reports coming in from Europe, the US, India, Japan, Australia and more.
The BBC reported that it contacted Google for comment but that a company representative described being unable to access Gmail.
Roughly an hour after the problems started, some users started to report Google services coming back online.
At 8:07 a.m., roughly 97 minutes into the service interruptions, Google tweeted that its services were “all clear.”
Google Workspace (@GoogleWorkspace) December 14, 2020
Some Twitter users replied saying they were still unable to load their Gmail accounts, screenshotting an error message that said their account was “temporarily unavailable.” One Business Insider staff member received the same message when trying to access email at 8:18 a.m. – but was able to access their account starting about 8:25 a.m.
A Google spokesperson told Business Insider the problems were caused by an “authentication system outage.”
“Today, at 3:47 a.m. PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32 a.m. PT. All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future,” the spokesperson said.
