Google Storage Was The Cause Of Their Recent Global Outage - Olmec Skip to main content

Google Storage Was The Cause Of Their Recent Global Outage

By January 2, 2021May 10th, 2022Technology News

If you make extensive use of Google’s products, you almost certainly noticed the worldwide outage of Google’s services.

As details continue to emerge about the outage, it’s increasingly clear that Google has some egg on its face and that the outage was an entirely self-inflicted wound.

The failure was ultimately caused by the company’s Identity Management System, which failed after a bug limited the amount of storage space available to it. As a result of that failure, users around the world suddenly found themselves unable to access their Google Drives, YouTube accounts, Gmail, Google Calendar, and more. Even Google Maps was offline for a time. Google responded quickly and efficiently and limited the outage to a bit less than an hour.

Once the issue had been resolved, the company tweeted out the following from their Google Cloud Account:

“Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored.”

Later, on the Google Cloud’s status page, the posted the following update and clarification:

“Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace experienced a global outage affecting all services which require Google account authentication for a duration of 50 minutes. The root cause was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally. As a result, we couldn’t verify that user requests were authenticated and served errors to our users.”

In a nutshell, Google experienced, on a global scale, what you’ll run into on your desktop PC if you run out of hard drive space. Suddenly, the various applications you’re running start to crash.

In any event, the problem is now solved, and in addition to wiping the egg off their collective faces, Google has taken steps to ensure that they don’t find themselves in a similar circumstance in the future.

Jason Manteiga

Jason J. Manteiga, Vice President of Olmec Systems, has been part of the company for over the past 20 years. He believes that having a great work environment and supportive team, is the ultimate key to success. Since being in the IT realm for over 25 years, Jason, along with Olmec Systems, has been on the Inc. 5000 “List of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies” and Channel Futures MSP 501 “Top Managed Service Providers in North America,” along with other awards and nominations. Jason earned his Bachelor Degree in Information Systems from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He also holds certifications in Microsoft MCSE, VMWare VCP, and Cisco CCNA. In his spare time, Jason is a contributor for The Center for Social & Legal Research (Privacy Exchange) and a member of the Morris County Chamber of Commerce. His hobbies include cycling and kayaking. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife, two daughters and son.