This is why Gmail and YouTube have crossed the world recently
Google diagnosed a widespread outage that shut down major services earlier this week, such as Gmail and YouTube, as an error with its online people identification system.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has several tools that allow it to verify and track logged in users. In October, the company began moving these tools to a new file storage system and in doing so misreported parts of the data, according to an article published Friday. This caused several of its services to crash for 47 minutes on Monday morning, a rare technical misstep.
Google’s explanation comes in a context of heightened vigilance in cybersecurity. A hack on software vendor SolarWinds Corp. exhibited companies such as Microsoft Corp. and several US government agencies.
A Google spokeswoman said on Friday that the internet giant had found no evidence that the SolarWinds hack had affected Alphabet or Google’s systems.
About 15% of requests sent to Google’s cloud storage service were interrupted during Monday’s blackout, the company said. The cloud division offers an identification service similar to that of Okta Inc.
Google’s Gmail service suffered another disruption on Tuesday. The company attributed this to a data migration issue.
