Google blames Gmail, YouTube outage on error in user ID system

19-12-2020

Google diagnosed a widespread outage that knocked out major services earlier this week, such as Gmail and YouTube, as a mistake with its system for identifying people online. Alphabet Inc.�s Google has several tools that enable it to verify and track logged-in users. In October, the company began moving those tools to a new file storage system, and in the process misreported portions of the data, according to a Friday post. That caused several of its services to go down for 47 minutes Monday morning, a rare technical misstep. Google�s explanation comes amid heightened cybersecurity vigilance. A hack on software provider SolarWinds Corp. has exposed companies including Microsoft Corp. and multiple US government agencies. A Google spokeswoman said on Friday that the internet giant has found no evidence the SolarWinds hack affected Alphabet or Google�s systems. About 15 percent of requests sent to Google�s cloud storage service were disrupted during the Monday outage, the company said. The cloud division offers an identification service similar to one from Okta Inc. On Tuesday, Google�s Gmail service had another disruption. The company attributed this to an issue with data migration.