Google's Gmail, YouTube & Other Services Were Down Worldwide

Everyone after restarting wifi, running troubleshoot, rewiring, OS update, and system repair, realising that Google services except Google Search are down. 

Google services were down for more than 15 minutes, what a way to end the perfect year, 2020. 

Despite the massive blackouts, within the first 30 minutes, the company's automated systems reported no issues for all services, in both consumer-facing and its cloud tools for the developer. A Google spokesperson said the outage was caused by a failure of the company's authentication tools that control how users log in to services provided by both Google and third-party developers. Services requiring users to login experienced high error rates during this period, which resulted in multiple users reporting that Slack, Twitch, Zoom, and other applications faced problems too. However, YouTube was working on incognito mode. Web-users worldwide got a jolting reminder about just how dependent we are all on Google from unlocking our doors to attending an online classroom.

Web servers or facilities can be overwhelmed at any moment for several reasons, such as a sudden increase in site traffic.

An example of this is when a college admissions form is live, so many people are attempting to access the website to secure their seats, and the website cannot identify whom to respond to. That's why it confuses and falls. Traffic spikes can be a short-term problem, however, the  impact on the credibility of the organisation can last.

Viruses or worms 

If a virus or worm infiltrates a large number of browsers or machines, it may cause abnormally high traffic patterns which will affect your server operations.

Attacks by DoS or DDoS

Denial-of-service or distributed-denial-of-service attacks are hacker-initiated attacks that make a server unavailable to its intended users.
Hackers crash the system by flooding the network with bogus requests and forcing it to reject true requests.

Google’s paramount services like Gmail and YouTube were down for millions around the globe, and then came the slew of complaints on social media platforms. 

“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,” posted Team YouTube. 

As always Twitterati went on with their questions and memes

A user wrote: #Googleisdown 2020 continues to be in top form @Google. 

Another user said: I'm sitting here in the dark... literally Google home is down and I can't turn my lights on.

While Burger King said: Hey @Google - have you tried turning it off and on again?

Swiggy also jumped in and said: This is the universe telling you to take a break, and order in. #GoogleDown #YouTubeDown

This reminded us once again of how much we relied on Google and its services. It is hard to live with such outages, we expect that everything will be restored as quickly as possible. We would have loved to reach out to Google to get a response from their end but, then we remembered that Gmail is down, so no feedback from them.

Many companies saw this as an opportunity to promote their business or services. For example, DuckDuckGo began promoting their browser over Twitter to get some of the users affected by the outage.

It was the third outage within the last six months from Google. Other tech giants have also faced their share of services going down.

However, minutes of standstill were back on track and the world could resume their work with Google services. Team YouTube dropped an update regarding its services, “ We’re back up and running! You should be able to access YouTube again and enjoy videos as normal.”