Google released the following statement about the outage on Monday, December 14th, 2020:
“Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace experienced a global outage affecting all services which require Google account authentication for a duration of 50 minutes. 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. …We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation.”
In light of recent prominent events related to cybersecurity, LITS would like to assure the Allegheny College community that the Google outage was not a security incident but rather an internal problem at Google.