On December 14, 2020, Google applications such as YouTube, email and Docs, each suffered a service outage, according to the BBC. The impact was that users were unable to access most of the Google’s services. According to Google, the outage was brief (at 45 minutes) and the reason was due to “an internal storage quota issue.” Google’s last outage was in June 2019, which was due to a server issue.
Looking behind the Google outage is Ed Macnair, CEO of Censornet.
Macnair begins by assessing the scale of the problem: “Google users will have had a shock on December 14, 2020 at 11.56 hours (GMT), when Google services crashed. This resulted in the entire Google services suite going offline.”
The problem was that with Google services suspended, “so were many organisations’ operations.”
In terms of how the systems and services went down, Macnair notes: “Over 6 million companies use Google Workspace, which gives us some sense of the scale of the disruption.”
This is a sign that although cloud systems confer many advantages, when they go off-line so do many businesses operations.
In terms of how these risks can be expressed, Macnair explains: “In times of outage maintaining access to email, which is the most vital communication channel, is essential.”
And in terms of seeking to mitigate the risk presented, Macnair adds: “To reduce the risk of downtime firms need to have fallback solutions.” This includes third party providers that secure Gmail who can provide an emergency inbox service.
