Users of Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube around the world were affected by an unexpected outage on December 14, 2020. On Gmail, people were informed that their accounts were temporarily unavailable. Given the sheer popularity of services like Gmail and the size of Google, this is the biggest incident of downtime for years. But what exactly happened in the 2020 google outage? Was it a cyber incident?
Gmail Outage December 2020
Being a bit of a fiend for relentlessly checking emails, I first noticed something was awry with my Gmail when I was presented with the below error message.
I’ve been using Gmail for a good few years and I’ve honestly never once encountered an outage in the service. With all the budget available to Google for information security, I initially would’ve considered myself highly surprised if a hack was the reason.
In an attempt to determine if other Google services were affected, I loaded up YouTube and was shocked to find myself greeted with the below error. It then became clear the outage was more severe and widespread than I first imagined.
I became suspicious given the multiple services affected that this pointed towards a cyber attack of unprecedented scale.
From a personal perspective, I was worried that the Google Docs file I’d spent 4 hours working on would no longer exist. I’m sure many of you reading felt similar levels of worry about your important documents. Sure enough, when trying to refresh my Drive, I received a blank screen and a server error message. Yikes.
With much of the world wondering WTF was going on, Google remained silent on social media platforms. Speculation mounted; some people assumed it was a technical server error, while others pointed out that Google would have redundancy in place all over the planet via cloud computing, so an internal technical issue would be unlikely.
Google services then began functioning again at around 12.35 GMT. I refreshed my Gmail, and voila, my email inbox greeted me. The 2020 Google outage was over. And the world’s collectively breathed a sigh of relief.
So what happened?
As of now, it appears the issue stemmed from Google Accounts. It’s not looking like an information security issue. One Twitter user reported it was possible to access the offline services via incognito browsing.
The total outage was around 40 minutes long, but the discussion volume it generated on twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms was breathtaking. What this Google outage revealed was the extraordinary extent to which so many people rely on these services for work or entertainment.
Even if the cause ultimately ends up not being a cyber attack, it’s still a prime example of just how lucrative a successful cyber attack on Google services could be. With so many dependant on these services for school, work, and entertainment, the ransom a hacker could demand would be mind-boggling.