Google has revealed that an authentication system outage, caused by an internal storage quota issue, is the reason behind a global outage of its services on Monday.
On Monday afternoon, Google’s services that include Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Maps, AdWords and AdSense, Google Pay, Google Home, Nest and Google’s Chromecast went down in various countries around the world.
In Africa, in particular users in Zimbabwe and South Africa, reported experiencing challenges in accessing Google applications.
People who wanted to log in to some of Google’s services experienced error messages while many received notifications that they were not able to access their accounts.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement on Monday that the outage lasted for nearly an hour.
“Today, at 3.47AM PT (13:47 CAT) Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue,” reads part of the statement. “Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period.”
The spokesperson said the authentication system issue had been resolved a few minutes later and that “they will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future”.
The authentication system of this US-based multinational technology giant is used to manage how users log in to services run by both Google and third-party developers.
