Google Services Global Outage: Here’s Why Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs & Other Services Were Down

Google’s services, including Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube and others, faced a global outage on December 14. The company blamed an ‘internal storage quota issue’ for the same. The outage lasted almost 45 minutes across all Google services with users unable to login. Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard showed an outage for all services. Later, Google Workspace tweeted saying, ‘Thanks for staying with us’. When Google’s services go down, billions of users are impacted. That’s because Gmail, YouTube have more than a billion users on a monthly basis. Some users reported seeing a 503 error when they tried to login to their Gmail account. Others saw a 500 error when they try to open Gmail. Some even saw a message saying their Google account could not be found. When we tried opening YouTube, it said ‘Something went wrong’ and a picture of a monkey holding a wrench. Some people were also kicked out of their ongoing Google Meet sessions, and others were unable to join scheduled calls. Google Meet is the video-conferencing tool from the company.