- A host of Google services were knocked offline on December 14.
- These services included Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs.
- Google has since revealed the reason for the outage.
Update: December 15 2020 (4:54 AM ET): Google has revealed the reason for yesterday’s widespread service outage, noting that it was indeed related to authentication.
“Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored,” read a tweet from the Google Cloud Twitter account late yesterday.
“The root cause was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally,” the firm elaborated on the Google Cloud Status dashboard. “As a result, we couldn’t verify that user requests were authenticated and served errors to our users.”
Original article: December 14 2020 (7:08 AM ET): It’s rare for Google services to go offline for any length of time, but it looks like a variety of Google services are all down right now.
YouTube, Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Analytics, and Nest services are all down as of 6:48 AM ET, suggesting that this is a widespread issue with Google’s infrastructure. Google confirmed the issue on its Workspace Status Dashboard, with the search giant noting that the issue also affects the likes of Google Keep, Google Drive, Google Meets, and more.
Android Authority staff in India, the UK, South Africa, and the US all report that Google services are down, showing that this isn’t just a regional issue. Other markets affected by the outage according to Downdetector include Egypt, Malaysia, New Zealand, Romania, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey.
Oddly enough, it seems like YouTube Music is still accessible on desktop, although users seem to be logged out and trying to log in results in an error page. Meanwhile, the YouTube Music Android app only offers downloaded music. Furthermore, the aforementioned websites seem to be accessible via incognito mode, suggesting that the issue is related to account authentication.
We’ll be updating this article as we learn more about the outage and when things go back to normal.
