Failure Google's crash comes to an end: Gmail, YouTube and other services return to normal
Outlook is down and Office and Teams have connection issues
Google yesterday had a significant drop in its services, which despite lasting only 35 minutes,
was felt throughout the world
not only by the questionable dependence we have on its digital services, such as the search engine, YouTube, Maps, Meet, Gmail or Drive;
but because a large part of
the population is teleworking
and needs these tools even more.
Google's official explanation is that it 'experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to
an internal storage quota issue
'.
Translated into Spanish, this means that if you had logged into your Google account to use any of their services, you could not use them.
Ironically, if you tried, for example, to access YouTube in the incognito mode of your browser, it did work more or less well.
"It was something that many habitual of these topics quickly realized: if you weren't authenticated, it worked," says Álvaro Núñez Romero, professor in the Master in Computer Security at UNIR.
What is strange is the mention of "an internal storage quota problem".
Does this mean your services did not work yesterday because they had 'run out of space on your hard drives'?
"Obviously,
Google does not run out of space,
" says Diego Suárez, CTO of Transparent CDN.
"They have given a somewhat generic explanation, I guess as they get more data. The problem here is that
'quota' can be many things
.
It is not possible to specify more precisely the origin of the problem because
only Google can clarify it, and that will take a while
.
As Suárez explains, "until they publish a post mortem, a detailed report of what happened, we will not know what exactly happened."
Google spokesmen were quick to point out that what happened yesterday "was not a cyber attack, but an internal problem."
Given these times, in which 'massive hacks' are our daily bread and in the US they have faced a very severe one this week, it is the first thing that many thought.
But it
would be very rare if it had been a computer attack due to the nature of the failure
.
"If there is a cyber attack, a part of their services would have been affected, not all of them at the same time, as they are highly fragmented," adds Núñez.
Although cyberterrorism movies have instilled otherwise, hacking a giant like Google to the point of causing everything to fail at once is almost impossible.
In the words of Suárez: "I don't think it was an attack, it is something that I would download because Google has more infrastructure than anyone else to support a denial of service attack.
To bring down Google, it would have to be bigger than Google
."
Contrary to what it may seem of a company as large and important as Google, everything opaque they are when it comes to collecting our user data, they 'compensate' by being transparent when they suffer a technical failure.
"
In Google they are usually transparent when something like yesterday happens,
" says Suárez.
"Be it more or less serious, when they have a fault, they usually publish and share their reports about it in order to help in future occasions."
Yesterday's Google problem was so noticeable because, despite its brevity, it
affected all the great services we constantly use
from the company.
In August, there was a problem with Gmail video calls and attachments that lasted for seven hours, but was not as talked about, for example.
"Only when it affects us personally do we realize and worry that something serious might happen," Núñez sentenced.
For experts in 'the cloud', that Google has recovered in less than an hour, as much as it has affected the lives of many people, is an example of our lack of patience with technology.
"Failures happen and Google is not exempt from them. Despite having the best teams and the best experts, no one is free from faults," says Suárez.
And he continues: "We have a dependency on absolute immediacy and
we are not even used to staying 20 minutes without our toys
."
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
Google
Innovation Traffic record in ESpanix: 1Tb / sec for the Spanish neutral internet node
TechnologyBlack Friday 2020: the best technology discounts the day before Black Friday
GeForce Now comes to iPhone and iPad through Safari
See links of interest
Last News
TV programming
English translator
2021 business calendar
2020 business calendar
TV Movies
Topics
Coronavirus Spain
Girona - Rayo Vallecano
Celta de Vigo - Cádiz