This is what caused 2020's biggest Google outage

Technology giant Google has published preliminary details about the reasons that caused the global outage of Gmail, YouTube

and its other services recently. The latest outage is internally tagged

as 'Google Cloud Infrastructure Components incident 20013'. The company

says that the root cause for the disruption in Google services was an

issue in Google's automated storage quota management system, which

reduced the capacity of the authentication system. This reduced storage

capacity of Google’s central identity-management system, in turn,

blocked services that required a user to login. Google suffered a

major outage on December 14. Two main services Google Cloud Platform,

which means Cloud Console, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and the Google

Kubernetes Engine were impacted. G Suite services like Gmail, Calendar,

Meet, Docs and Drive were also affected. The outage lasted for about 45

minutes causing authentication errors for users in several parts of the

world. This

was the third major outage faced by Google users in the past two

months. Although the disruption was not as long as the Amazon Web

service outage in November that lasted for nearly five hours. However,

the outage affected each company’s technical support and the ability to

connect with customers externally. In its preliminary report, Google

says that "Many of our internal users and tools experienced similar

errors, which added delays to our outage external communication". Once

the company completes its internal investigation, Google intends to

publish a detailed report with a complete analysis of the incident.