On December 14, Google services suffered a large-scale global outage. Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Pay and others went down and could not be used normally, though most of the search business stayed intact.
Media reports say the outage was wide-reaching, affecting the United States, Europe, India, Canada, South Africa, countries in Central and South America, Australia, and several others. Google’s automated internal systems kept reporting that nothing was wrong — including consumer services and developer-facing cloud services — until 30 minutes after the disruption began. It wasn’t until 12:25 that Google finally identified the problem.
Google’s official account posted that due to an internal storage quota issue, the Google authentication system was down for roughly 45 minutes, and that all services had now recovered.
For a top-tier internet company like Google, an outage like this is genuinely rare.
Google’s previous global outage was on September 25. Back then the paralysis was concentrated mostly on the US east coast, and while Gmail, YouTube, and Google Cloud were down, users kept retrying and kept failing to get in.