Several Google Services including Gmail, YouTube and Google Drive suffered a massive outage around 5:40pm on Monday as users across the world flooded complaints regarding login issues with Gmail as well as Google Meet sessions.
The Google server crash had set panic waves across businesses in several parts of India and the rest of the world. Consequently, Mr. Praveen Khandelwal, Secretary General of the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) expressed his concerns about the outage affecting the Domestic Trade & Industry.
“It is all of a sudden that we found Gmail is not working. Neither we are able to send or receive any mails through Gmail resulting into mass level setback to Trade & Industry of the Company,” he explained.
Given that the majority of traders in India are Gmail subscribers, the outage has led to a mass scale disruption of business activities as it blacked out their communication network completely for more than an hour. Furthermore, the advent of digital era has replaced traditional modes of correspondence like letters and other physical modes of communication.
The traders across the country have reportedly complained to CAIT headquarters at New Delhi and it was verified and established that Google servers were down for a considerable time on 14th December (Monday evening).
“We are encountering an error message trying to access Google services including Google docs, slides, Calendar, Drive, Chat and Google Meet… etc.,” said Mr. Khandelwal.
“At a time when we are fastly moving towards digital commerce and adopting and accepting digital payments, sudden outage of Google services is a matter of great concern,” added Mr. Khandelwal.
Later on, a Google spokesperson reportedly attributed the outage of “approximately 45 minutes” to “an internal storage quota issue”. “Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period,” he said.
“All services are now restored,” he added while apologising to all affected users and promising a “thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
Although, users mostly reported Gmail outage as the primary issue, the service status page on Down Detector showed red for most services. “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by 12/14/20, 5:42 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change,” clarified an update on the Google Workspace Status dashboard, posted at 5.25PM IST.
Around 6.22 PM, Google posted another update that “problem with Gmail should be resolved for the vast majority of affected users”. By then most other Google services were also back online.
