Google Down: what happened to Big G

What if suddenly we won’t be able anymore to do a Google research? If won’t be able anymore to send an email with gmail. What if we will lose the contact with the whole classroom during a distance learning lesson. If we won’t be able to open YouTube? For some of us it might seem the beginning of the end, almost an apocalyptic scenario. It happened yesterday (14th december of the 2020), when for almost two hours many of the services of the informatic colossus Google had some failures. What did happen to Google? What did the world do during the almost two hours of Google Down?

Google Down: when to go offline is the biggest informatic colossus of the world

We aren’t talking about the web site of Uncle John that sell bio veggy from his home garden. We are talking about who created internet. How is it possible that to go offline is the biggest informatic colossus of the world?

And we don’t have to be surprised if there was who was afraid about it. “If a giant of the web like Google goes down in many areas of the world, it is something serious”.

So all the people went on the other online services, which were all working great, on the main social networks, like Facebook and Twitter mostly. While the students that were in distance learing had a small unexpected holiday.

All of it happend from the 12:30 to the 14:00 about (italian time). Something went wrong in Mountain View, but, even if the problem was solved in a little bit more than a hour, we still didn’t understand what happened.

We only know that a sudden stop put down Youtube, Gmail, Google Drive, G Suite, Google Meet, but even other services like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Home, Nest, Google Classroom. Almost all the services offered by Big G had a sudden and unexplained malfunction. It doesn’t seem, instead, that the search engine itself had problems.

Malfunctions all over the world

The reports arrived from all the world, United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, Central America, South America, but especially from Europe. Most of the reports, infact, came from the old continent. Even if it doesn’t mean that the Down of Google mostly interested this area of the world.

The reason of it, instead, seems to be aimed just to time zone. While here it was the middle of the day, with the distance learning all going, the offices opened and basically all the population online, in America it was still night.

The reports collected on the website DownDetector are about 50 thousands.

Google Down: the moment of the malfunction

What did the users see in that 90 minutes of Google Down?

On Youtube a purple monkey said to the users that “something went wrong”. A not unusual message for the internet surfers, but no one ever think to see it on Youtube!

On Gmail, instead, we read “Sorry… the system had a problem”.

Meanwhile the users started to write their experiences on the socials, with the hashtag #GoogleDown.

A user writes on twitter: “I’m here sat, on the dark, in the children room, because the light is controlled by Google Home”.

Someone even found an alternative solution and shared it with the other users: “Use the incognito mode”.

Google Down and the distance learning

At the moment of the malfunction, in Italy, many students were doing the last hour of lesson in distance learning. Maybe someone was able to enter in the servers used for the videolessons, during the Google Down. Because many funny messages started to appear, like: “Your hacker friend thought to anticipate the holiday”.

Meanwhile the users met on the socials, to compare themselves during this unexpected hour of holiday: “You could do it before, not at the end of the lessons”; “This part of my life, this small part, is called happiness”; “Please go on for other 72 hours, thanks”.

What happened to Big G?

Google remained in contact with the users for all the Google Down, by keeping them informed about the situation and by assuring them that the problem will be soon solved. But what happened to the Big G?

It was a leak in the system of authentication, to confirme it it was Google itself. After the first moments of panic, between who was afraid to lose all the datas of the accounts connected with Big G and who thought it was cyber terrorism, at the end everything was solved. No hacker attacks, only a technical problem.

It was “a stop of the system of authentication for about 45 minutes because of a problem about a quote of internal memory”.

Anyway Google said that it will go on investigating, to better understand what happened and to avoid that the problem will occur again in the future. “We had access problems to many of our products. Most of them come back to the normal functioning. We are still investigating”.

This post is also available in: Italiano