Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and others, stopped working for users worldwide on Monday. The search giant has now explained why the massive outage that crippled some of the significant services offered by Google. The company said that Google’s automated storage quota management system was the primary cause behind global outage.
“Google uses an evolving suite of automation tools to manage the quota of various resources allocated for services. As part of an ongoing migration of the User ID Service to a new quota system, a change was made in October to register the User ID Service with the new quota system, but parts of the previous quota system were left in place which incorrectly reported the usage for the User ID Service as 0. An existing grace period on enforcing quota restrictions delayed the impact, which eventually expired, triggering automated quota systems to decrease the quota allowed for the User ID service and triggering this incident. Existing safety checks exist to prevent many unintended quota changes, but at the time they did not cover the scenario of zero reported loads for a single service,” Google said in its blog.
As per Downdetector, the website that tracks web outages, reported over 40,000 outage cases from around the world nearly 10 minutes after the blackout began. YouTube and Gmail seem to have been the worst hit globally, causing an uproar on Twitter about how Google services have left them high and dry, especially on the first day of the week.
Google apologized to the users for the inconvenience caused and improved its systems to prevent such scenarios in the future. “We would like to apologize for the scope of impact that this incident had on our customers and their businesses. We take any incident that affects the availability and reliability of our customers extremely seriously, particularly incidents which span multiple regions,” Google said in the blog.
