UPDATED 14:57 EDT / DECEMBER 14 2020

CLOUD

Multiple Google services briefly go offline after wide-reaching authentication issue

Many of Google LLC’s most widely used services, including Gmail, Google Docs and Maps temporarily went offline this morning as a result of an issue with an internal authentication system.

The search giant resolved the problem for most users in less than an hour. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement that the outage was the result of Google experiencing 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.”

Google first confirmed the outage on the Gmail status page in an update posted at 6:55 a.m. EST. “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail,” the company’s engineers wrote in the memo.

About 36 minutes later, a second update appeared on the page saying that service has been restored for some accounts. Finally, 21 minutes after the second update, Google confirmed that the issue had been resolved “for the vast majority of affected users.”

While the Gmail outage was being addressed, many of Google’s other services experienced issues as well. Most of the core productivity applications that make up G Suite went offline along with Maps, Google Analytics, YouTube and Google Assistant to name a few affected services. The Google Assistant outage also cascaded to other products that rely on the voice assistant, including the search giant’s popular Nest line of smart home gadgets.

The outage just comes weeks after Amazon Web Services Inc. experienced an issue with one of the data processing services in its public cloud. The glitch caused disruptions for a number of platforms hosted on AWS, including Roku and Twilio, as well as for some of the cloud giant’s own products.

Some users of Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook, in turn, this morning reportedly had difficulties accessing the email service.

Photo: Unsplash

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