‘Internal Storage Quota Issue’, Says Google on What Went Wrong

Services were later restored and Google said that the outage was caused by an ‘internal storage quota issue.’

Google services, including Gmail, YouTube and Google Search were down momentarily on Monday, 14 December.

(Photo: AP)

Google services, including Gmail, YouTube and Google Search were down momentarily on Monday, 14 December, for several users across the world. Google has officially acknowledged the issue and said that the outage, which lasted almost 45 minutes, was caused by an ‘internal storage quota issue’.

In an official statement, a Google spokesperson reportedly said, “Today, at 3.47AM 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 4:32AM 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.”

Statement from Google

Google designates system crashes into three segments – No Issues, Service Disruption and Service Outage. According to the Google Workspace Status Dashboard, most of the company products were down from 5:25 pm IST to 6:22 pm IST.

Gmail service details on 14 December(Photo: Screenshot of Google Workspace Status Dashboard)

“We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now – our team is aware and looking into it. We'll update you here as soon as we have more news: Team YouTube,” read the Google statement.

The Google Workspace Status Dashboard has been updated by the company and the following services were ticked as down:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Drive
• Google Docs
• Google Sheets
• Google Slides
• Google Sites
• Google Groups
• Classic Hangouts
• Google Chat
• Google Meet
• Google Vault
• Currents
• Google Forms
• Google Cloud Search
• Google Keep
• Google Tasks
• Google Voice

Downdetector, which detects platform shutdowns and crashes, reported over 36,000 crash reports for YouTube. Reports suggest that the services have now been restored for most users.