On Monday, 14 December 2020, Google suffered a massive outage affecting YouTube, Gmail, Google Classroom, and more. Over the past year, Google has already suffered around 11 outage. These outages have hampered people from sending emails, opening classrooms, and others worldwide or in a local area. This is due to the massive spike in both users and G-Suite usage, due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The increase in user activity has led to extreme server strain on Google’s servers, as they didn’t expect this massive spike in activity from the Pandemic. They also face difficulties building new servers due to the Pandemic as well. The number of issues reported on Down Detector are higher than ever before with the outage map showing issues starting to crop out worldwide.
Since two months ago, Google has made efforts to reduce the number of outages through auto deleting items in the trash after 30 days, limiting education accounts to 1TB of drive storage, and the removal of the YouTube poll, amongst other things. No matter how big we think a system is, every system will always have its limitations. Whatever is happening with Google, let these events be a reminder to us that no software is perfect, and errors and limitations are bound to happen.