Heard about the Google worldwide outage?

Have you all heard about the Global Google outage on December 14, 2020, affecting most of the essential services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google

Play. If not, this blog will benefit you.

First, to understand — if you think if this is the first time we had a global google outage?

The answer is, “NO.”

We faced outages earlier on August 20, 2020, and November 11, 2020. Outage time in each time was different — the recent one last for 47 minutes, impacting the Critical services.

Secondly, on the Impact — The outage severely disrupted services for many workplaces. Google Suite, one of the services affected, manages not only email communication but also intra-office messaging through the Chat and Meet services, and actual work through Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

The outage also affected Google’s Smart Home services, including the Google Home smart speakers and the Nest thermostats and smoke alarms. The widespread failure of Google services revealed to many the extent to which they rely on the company for basic tasks. Google smart home services were some of the first to cause real problems. Users who had rebuilt their homes around voice commands found themselves unable to turn on the lights thanks to Google Home and Google Assistant’s failure. Simultaneously, those with the company’s Nest thermostats were unable to control their home’s heating with an app, as they had become used to doing.

Root cause:

The outage’s root cause is a failure in the automation tool and not any cyber-attack. This tool increases the storage space handling the user authentication. Due to the lack of space allocation, the system crashed, resulting in the outage, which lasted for 47 minutes. The issue mainly affected the services, which require a user login. Eventually, Google fixed the problem, and the services were back to normal after the outage.

My Takeaway:

Though the outage was on a shorter period, the Lesson to be learned from such incidents, in my view, is not too reliant on any technology to a greater extent. Controlling home on voice control / use a security services tool should also have a manual override to sit in a dark environment waiting for the services to be back. Finally, closing my blog with a proverb.

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