[Software] Google reveals cause behind global system outage

[_Happy boy]

 

 

Google has recently suffered a major global outage that temporarily took down several of its services for about 45 minutes.

On Monday, 14th December, Google experienced a system outage, which prevented users from accessing platforms such as Gmail, YouTube and the whole suite of Google Workspace solutions. The incident also knocked out smart home products like Google Home and even Google Assistant, according to reports.

The tech giant has now released the findings of its investigation and released a statement explaining what caused the system failure.  

According to Google, its automated storage quota management system was the major cause behind the global outage.

“Google uses an evolving suite of automation tools to manage the quota of various resources allocated for services. As part of an ongoing migration of the User ID Service to a new quota system, a change was made in October to register the User ID Service with the new quota system, but parts of the previous quota system were left in place which incorrectly reported the usage for the User ID Service as 0,” said the company in its report.

The company noted that the outage would’ve happened earlier, if not for a grace period the company had put in place. Unfortunately, that fix expired, triggering automated systems to decrease the quota allowed for the User ID service and triggering this incident.

Google emphasised that they had safeguards in place to prevent those types of issues, but they weren’t built to handle many unintended quota changes, which was the case last Monday.

Approximately 15% of requests to Google Cloud Storage (GCS) were impacted during the outage, specifically those using OAuth, HMAC or email authentication.

Google’s explanation comes amid increased cybersecurity vigilance following a major hack on software provider SolarWinds, which exposed numerous US government firms and companies including Microsoft. Google reported that it has found no evidence the SolarWinds hack affected Alphabet or Google’s systems.