Google reveals Gmail, YouTube outage occurred due to error in User ID system

Gmail, YouTube, Meet, and other Google services faced a widespread outage on December 14 for about 47 minutes. Google has now identified the root cause of the outage and has said that the company is taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability. The outage had occurred because of a technical misstep stemming from an error in the User ID system due to the transfer of tools to a new storage system. 

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The American tech giant has said that some of the tools that it was transferring to a new quota system were left in place which caused the outage on Monday. Google User ID Service maintains a unique identifier for every account and stores data for those accounts in a distributed database. Google started shifting the User ID Service to a new system and a change was made in October to register the User ID with the new system. 

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Services restored within an hour

But due to some technical reasons, some of the User ID from the previous system was left in a place and caused the outage in services for some users. Google said that the problem was identified at 03:48 within one minute of customer impact and at 04:08 engineers identified the root cause. The company said that the error rates were returned to normal levels at 04:33 and almost all services were restored. However, some user services took longer to recover. 

"We would like to apologize for the scope of impact that this incident had on our customers and their businesses. We take any incident that affects the availability and reliability of our customers extremely seriously, particularly incidents that span multiple regions. We are conducting a thorough investigation of the incident and will be making the changes which result from that investigation our top priority in Google Engineering," Google said. 

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Google has apologised for the error to customers whose services or businesses were impacted during this incident. Earlier, it was believed that the outage had occurred due to the cyberattack through software provider SolarWinds Corp. that affected US government agencies and tech giants, including Microsoft

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