Google-owned apps crash worldwide for one hour

Google said its authentication system outage was due to an internal storage quota issue as services were requiring users to log in at the same time, which hit at a higher rate than it could handle

Hundreds of millions of people around the world were thrown into disarray today as the entirety of the Google-owned family of apps crashed worldwide for one hour.

The outage affected all of the Google apps and websites, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Maps and YouTube as well as the main search engine.

Google released a statement saying its authentication system outage was due to an internal storage quota issue.

Services were requiring users to log in at the same time, which hit at a higher rate than it could handle.

Google’s websites are some of the most popular in the world, with video-streaming site YouTube frequented by more than two billion people every month.

Gmail meanwhile is the world’s most popular email platform with 1.5 billion users.

Google said in a statement that the problems affected ‘the majority’ of each services’ users, but did not provide an exact number.

Outages are rare at Google, which was the third company to be worth more than $1trillion, and there has been no explanation provided for the current difficulties.

Rival tech firms including Facebook regularly have connectivity problems, with a mass outage striking the Mark Zuckerberg-owned family of apps last week.

Messenger, Facebook and Instagram went down for four hours on Thursday, with issues starting at 9:30am GMT and enduring until the afternoon.

WhatsApp was unaffected but other services were malfunctioning, with users unable to send or receive messages.

The mass crash also affected Google Home and Nest, which allows people to control their heating and lights among other things.

With Google Assistant forced offline some customers were left with a defunct doorbell while others were unable to turn on, or off, their lights.

Outage tracker site DownDetecter clocked tens of thousands of users reporting issues with the sites around 11:40am.

Problems were reported mainly in Europe but also in Australia, the east coast of the USA and parts of Africa, South America and Asia.

By 11:54am GMT there was more than 50,000 complaints for YouTube alone, with half (49 per cent) regarding the website and 43 per cent pertaining to problems watching videos.

Gmail had 23,000 complaints before midday and Google’s main site had a reported 19,000 complaints at the same time.

Eighty-one and 91 per cent of the issues with these sites, respectively, was to do with logging in, according to DownDetector.

The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32AM PT, a Google spokesperson shared. All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.