Why was Google down? 🤔
Explaining why Google was down on 14 December, 2020.
Google was down for 47 minutes on Monday 14 December, 2020. The outage was worldwide. But why did that happened?
The issue was not with YouTube or Gmail. Not all Google services were down. Users were not able to use those services which require user authentication. That’s why people were able to use those services in incognito mode and some other services also which does not require user authentication.
The Problem
The problem was with the Google’s Central Identity Management System (CIMS).
What is CIMS?
Google’s CIMS manages the authentication of the users who want to visit google services. In simple words CIMS acts as a gate keeper who asks for your id card whenever you want to go inside your home. If you pass the gate keeper then you can go anywhere you want but if the gate keeper rejects your request then you will not be able to go inside.
Same was happened with Google’s CIMS. When users wanted to visit any of the services CIMS was not able to authenticate the users due to which users were getting errors.
In system designs these type of points are called Single points of failure (SPOF).
Single Points of Failure?
In computing, context single point of failure is those point where the entire system can crash if that one single point fail.
Suppose you have a database and set of servers. If the database crashes then the entire system crashes. So your entire system design will be focused on this part.
The Root Cause
according to Google:
The root cause was an issue in our automated quota management system which reduced capacity for Google’s central identity management system, causing it to return errors globally. As a result, we couldn’t verify that user requests were authenticated and served errors to our users.
Well google haven't told the problem which was in automated quota management system till now let’s see if we will get to know about that.
The Lesson
The lesson here is to not rely on these services to much like if you have your smart bulbs, TV, refrigerator, etc. connected to Google home these times can be pretty hard for you
You can read about this incident in detail here: Google Cloud Status Dashboard
