Google pinpoints cause of Monday's widespread outage
Not a great start to the week for the big G.
Google services were down around the world earlier on Monday.
Google services suffered a widespread outage that lasted over an hour Monday, sparking complaints from users around the world that they couldn't access their email. The problem appears to have affected Gmail , YouTube , Google Drive , Google Hangouts and Google Meet.
According to DownDetector, the outage began around 6:25 a.m. ET (3:25 a.m. PT) and continued for over an hour. Google's own Workspace Status Dashboard showed all its services to be suffering outages. But Google Search appeared to still be working, as did Chrome. Around 7:40 a.m. ET (4:40 a.m. PT) services started coming back online.
Google's own statement shows the timings to be different, however. According to a statement from a Google spokesperson, the outage began at 3:47 a.m. PT and lasted around 45 minutes. The outage was not caused by a cyberattack, but by "an internal storage quota issue."
"Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period," said the spokesperson in a statement. "All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future."
The outage was a rough start to the week not just for Google, but for all the workers, students and businesses around the world that rely on Google Services.
Google's Dashboard was a sorry sight earlier Monday.
The hashtag #GoogleDown was trending on Twitter, with people complaining of being unable to do their jobs, complete assignments or meet important deadlines. Other users mused over our collective dependency on Google, wondering if it was perhaps, in fact, bad.
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