Millions of users were left without access to Google services after the tech giant was hit by a major service outage on Monday.
The problem lasted for around 45 minutes, beginning shortly before noon, with YouTube, Gmail and Google Meet among the services rendered inaccessible. According to the Google Workspace status dashboard, its main productivity services, including Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides, were down.
Google’s education platform, Google Classroom, was also experiencing problems. The platform has been used by students learning from home during the pandemic.
The tech giant’s search services were still functioning during the outage.
Users took to social media to vent their frustrations at the outage. The problem is likely to have affected millions of users. YouTube has more than two billion active users, while email platform Gmail has more than 1.5 billion users
A Google spokesperson said the problem was with its authentication system, and had occurred due to an internal storage quota issue.
“Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period,” the spokesperson said, adding that the problem was resolved shortly after 12.30pm. “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.”
