Google has been having a rough time this week with service outages. It has now had two days, maybe even three days depending on who you ask, of major downtime.
On Monday, Google’s authentication system went down for about an hour, taking down Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Docs, and most other Google services. Google blamed the outage on “an internal storage quota issue,” which sounds a lot like Google ran out of storage space.
On Tuesday, Gmail started having problems again, which Google’s status dashboard described as “a significant subset of users… seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.” Many reports, like this one from TechCrunch, said emails were instantly bouncing. Rival email service ProtonMail even says some emails sent to Gmail have been “permanently lost” and will need to be sent again.
Google’s Gmail status dashboard says any problems were resolved yesterday (12/15) just before 10pm ET, but this morning there are still reports of disrupted service in the comments on DownDetector. In particular, users who access Gmail through third-party clients seem to be having problems.
One interesting problem for automated systems is that the error message Gmail was sending Tuesday was “550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.” This isn’t a “Gmail is temporarily down” message but instead a permanent error message indicating an email address that is no longer in service. Many mailing list programs and automated systems will be proactive about culling dead addresses from the database, so users affected by the problems yesterday might have been automatically, silently removed from some lists.
Today, Google’s Workspace status dashboard says everything is fine.
