Google Explained Why YouTube, Gmail & Google Drive Were Down Last Night

Yesterday, it felt like the world had finally come to an end.

Reader: Was there a massive natural disaster that wiped out the entire planet?

Worse… YouTube was down. 

Reader: *gasps*

Unless you recently watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix, most of your existence is probably spent on the internet, whether it’s tweeting about your bowel movements or watching cute cat videos on YouTube.

However, users hit a snag yesterday when they tried to access YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive, as they were all down.

And now we know why.

Google Outage Around the World

Google confirmed that it had experienced a system outage for around 45 minutes last night (14 Dec).

Users were unable to access some of its applications, including YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive.

According to the BBC, the outage started shortly before 8pm Singapore time.

While Google’s search engine remained unaffected, users all over the world complained of issues with Docs, the Android Play Store, Maps and more.

Here in Singapore, there were 11,107 reports of problems with YouTube from 7.34 pm to around 10 pm, according to Down Detector.

The outage monitoring website showed that 48% of users complained of issues with watching videos, 44% had trouble with the website itself, while the rest couldn’t log into their YouTube accounts.

Gmail had an outage at the same time, with the main issue for users being an inability to log in.

Employees must have been devastated that they couldn’t get emails from their boss during dinner. 

The outage did more than bore avid YouTube users to death; it affected millions of its users who rely on its services for work and personal purposes.

Google Docs users, for instance, could only continue to work on their documents if they had been synced offline. Even then, they couldn’t use any of the online features.

Some users were even left in the dark – literally – as they had connected their smart lights to their Google Home, which wasn’t taking commands during the 45 minutes outage.

I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking… a lot right now.

— Joe Brown (@joemfbrown) December 14, 2020

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the outage was that it left many Pokémon GO players unable to log into their accounts.

Those 45 minutes must have been traumatic.

A Technical Fault to Blame

Fortunately, all services were restored around 45 minutes after they went down.

If you think it was caused by Google’s elatedness when they heard PM Lee’s speech about Phase 3 and vaccines, you’re wrong.

Google later explained that the worldwide service outage was caused by a technical fault inside its authentication system.

A change to server settings had been made and was only intended for a small number of servers in a single region, but it ended up being applied to many more.

“We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future,” Google said.

For most of 2020, we’ve been complaining about the lack of travel and large parties, but for 45 minutes on Monday, we experienced what it would be like to have a world without YouTube.

And it was truly darker than anything we’ve seen this year.

Featured Image: YouTube