Google down: Here is why the search engine suffered global outage

The season finale of 2020 saw a Google outage that disrupted access to applications including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive Monday evening. 

The global outage brought the world together, for the second time this year, as users speculated the reason behind the disruption. 

As much as people would like to blame the disruption on the year 2020, the reason why Google suffered an outage was an "internal storage quota issue".

In a statement, Google said it experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. 

A Google spokesperson explained to India Today Tech that the internal tools that the tech giant uses to allocate sufficient storage to each of its services that handle authentication did not work as expected. When the storage limit was exhausted, the system failed to automatically make more storage available, causing the system to crash. 

Here's how Pakistan's Twitterati reacted to the Google outage

All devices and services need storage to operate and in events when there is none available, the system simply stops working. Its like when your computer runs out of storage and suddenly everything running on your system begins to crash.

Outages on select Google apps are not uncommon, but Monday’s outage affected all its popular services, including Google Hangouts, Google Chats and Google Meet, products that people have used extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to outage monitoring website DownDetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the United States, Britain, India and Pakistan.