What Google’s ‘incident report’ on 4-plus hour long Gmail and Google Drive outage says – Times of India

Gmail, Google’s email service, experienced a global outage on Thursday, August 8, leaving millions of users unable to send emails or save attachments for over four hours. The disruption, which also affected Google Drive, began at 19:15 UTC and lasted until midnight.
According to Google’s Workspace status dashboard, users attempting to send emails or save drafts with attachments encountered failures.The outage impacted Gmail’s more than 1.8 billion active users worldwide, with thousands reporting issues on social media platforms and outage tracking websites.

What does Google has to say on Gmail, Google Drive outage

Google has confirmed in the ‘incident report’ that the root cause of the problem was “a latent misconfiguration of our lock-service infrastructure that impacted a critical storage layer during a high-load scenario.” The company emphasised that this was not the result of a cyberattack, alleviating concerns about potential security breaches.
The outage primarily affected the ability to send emails with attachments and save drafts containing attachments. Users could still send emails without attachments and receive emails with attachments during the disruption. Google Drive users also experienced degraded performance while attempting to upload files.
By 22:07 UTC, Google reported that its engineering teams were implementing several fixes, resulting in reduced error rates. However, it wasn’t until 00:11 UTC on Friday, August 9, that the company announced the issue had been fully resolved.
The company has issued an apology and promised to release a full incident report with more details about the outage.