Google was down for a while on August 8, 2022, and even if it’s for a while when it is services like Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Photos, etc then that’s a ginormous problem. Just the main Google Search website gets around 80 billion visits a month or about a million searches per minute on average. That’s the scale that we are talking about here. So, you see how many people around the world would be affected by a Google outage. However, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. We have kept note of the various times Google has gone “Aw, snap, that’s an error” on us. Let’s begin with the latest one.
https://twitter.com/downdetector/status/1556810655344238598?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Google was reportedly out of order since 6:37 am IST and by around 7:07 am, there were over 41,000 complaints. Some software update was the cause for this. Users were getting Error 500 or 502.
Google expressed regret for the same by saying, “We apologize for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online.”
The case is internally called Google Cloud Infrastructure Components incident 20013. It was caused by a limited quota in Google's automated storage management system that blocked services that involved user login. It stayed an issue for ~45 minutes and services like Google Cloud Platform, Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Docs, and Drive were not allegedly functioning.
A few months back in the month of August 2020 too, a massive outage happened and Gmail was mainly hit.
In the 2020 incident, Videos were browsable but not playable. This impacted not just the regular YouTube on all platforms but also YouTube TV and YouTube Music.
However, in 2018, users were getting just a blank page when they tried watching YouTube on the web. Meanwhile, on the app, some users were getting Error 503.
https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1052393799815589889?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
We will Google, we will. Like always, you will find all netizens’ comments and reactions on Twitter. As for you readers, check Downdetector and Google Worspace Status Dashboard to know whether a Google service is down or not. Let's hope for the latter.