Google services has become very influential for two decades now, to a point that the world is heavily depending on it for everyday stuff. Services like email, videos, messaging, authentication across many web services and etc are highly dependent on Google working as it should. We can safely say that a downtime of a Google service in any country at the moment spells disaster for people that are highly dependent on the company that promises to “do no evil”.
Google services have 99.99999% of uptime, but there will always be time that an outage may occur, computers and networks are not perfect after all. The most recent incident of Google Service downtime affected Youtube, Google Music, Google Drive and Gmail.
“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior. Our Engineering Team believes they have identified the potential root causes of the errors and is still working to mitigate,” explained Google in their uptime page.
Apparently, the affected system was the one dealing with storage across the whole Google services. The issue was intermittent, lasted around 2 hours prior to Google Engineers intervened, and at the time of this writing all affected Google services are already in working order.
Google on its part maintains a portal where they display in a graphical format the services that are having issues, in order for the public to be aware of any service interruption or service outage.