Google global outage due to ‘internal storage quota issue’, company says

Technology giant Google has confirmed the worldwide service outage on Monday was brought on by a technical fault inside its own systems.

Google saw all its major apps, including YouTube and Gmail, go offline on Monday morning, leaving millions unable to access key services.

The company said the outage had occurred within its authentication system, which is used to log people into their accounts, due to an “internal storage quota issue” and apologised to users.

“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,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

Google saw all its major apps go offline on Monday morning.

“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.”

The incident had a far-reaching impact, as other Google services such as Google Maps, as well as Calendar and its cloud storage Google Drive app, were all listed as being affected by the outage on the company’s own status dashboard.

Visitors attempting to visit the YouTube website were met with an error message which said: “Something went wrong.”

Some of Google’s affected services are among the most widely used in the world – YouTube has more than two billion active users, while Gmail is the world’s most popular email platform with more than 1.5 billion users worldwide.

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