Security News > 2020 > December > Google outage caused by critical system running out of storage
The global Google services outage yesterday was caused by the company's Identity Management System failing after a bug restricted its storage space.
According to a tweet and a Google status report, the outage was caused by the company's automated quota management system reducing the amount of storage available to Google's authentication system.
"Today, at 3.47AM PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored," Google stated in a tweet from their Google Cloud account.
Google further clarified the cause of the outage in Google Cloud's status page, where they stated the reduced storage caused their identity management system to fail.
If you have ever run out of storage on your computer and found that applications began to crash or no longer worked, this is similar to what happened with Google's IdM. After running out of storage, Google IdM began returning errors that prevented users from authenticating to Google's services, including Cloud Console, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Google Kubernetes Engine, Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Docs, Drive, and YouTube.