When Google suffered a global outage on Monday, the millions-strong user base of the various services of Google were immediately left looking for answers. All the services of the tech giant were rendered unusable for nearly an hour and now Google says that the reason was an "internal storage quota issue".
This means that the internal system employed by Google to handle data storage for each Google service malfunctioned. It reached the threshold of its storage limit and the system thus failed to distribute data, causing the services to crash.
"Today, at 3:47 AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue,¡± the search giant wrote. ¡°The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32 AM PT. All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future," it further added.
Google explained that the error occurred in the evening as services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates at the time. The outage of Google services was experienced across platforms, including desktops, and Android and iOS devices.
At the time of the outage on Monday, people were left unable to work due to the downtime of Google services. While many waited for the services to resume, some tried to work around the crash and use Incognito on Chrome to try and reach the servers somehow, and others took to Twitter to share memes.
A similar outage, for a different reason, was also faced by the group of apps by Facebook including Instagram and Messenger recently. People reported the apps to have been unable to connect to the server for sometime.