Problems with accessing Google services continue, albeit on a smaller scale
Less than a day after the global crash in Google services, a new crash occurred. It was smaller and affected mostly the Gmail mail service.
The failure occurred on December 15 at about 10 pm Kyiv time. Users had access to their Gmail inboxes, but when they tried to send the email to another email, they received a message that the recipient’s account did not exist.
“We are aware of a problem with Gmail that has affected a significant number of users,” the company said in an official statement, promising to release an update soon. At approximately 2 a.m. Kyiv time, Google announced that the issue had been resolved. At this time, Gmail is running smoothly, although in some places users still complain about the slow operation of the service.
Why Google services crashed
The previous large-scale failure occurred on December 14 at about 2 p.m. At that time, Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Photos and Google Play stopped opening in many countries around the world. In about an hour the services were restored.
The speaker of Google stated that the failure was not related to cyberattacks or changes in the size of cloud storage, which was recently announced by the company.
Even later, Google announced that the essence of the problem, which will now go down in history as the ‘Google Cloud Infrastructure Components incident 20013’, was to reduce capacity in Google’s central system, which is responsible for managing user identity. It’s problems with blocked access to all services that required authorization.
And the root cause was a problem with Google’s automated cloud storage limit management system, which in turn reduced the authentication system’s throughput.