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Vikrant Bhat
Vikrant Bhat

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Google outage: Official explanation from Google

You might be aware that Google had a global level outage recently which impacted all their services from YouTube, GDrive to GCP and everything in between, infact even the Google oAuth was down, that means if you tried to login/signup into any website that uses Google oAuth then it would have failed during those 47 minutes of downtime.

Some on the Twitter rightly claimed that everyone could access YouTube without login, i.e browsing from the incognito window.
The reason why people could access YouTube without logging in was

The Google User ID Service maintains a unique identifier for every account and handles authentication credentials for OAuth tokens and cookies. It stores account data in a distributed database, which uses Paxos protocols to coordinate updates. For security reasons, this service will reject requests when it detects outdated data.

So what this basically means is that their central Authentication management system was affected and thats why everyone could stream YouTube videos from an incognito window since YouTube allows its users to view YouTube without logging in.

Check this blog for the official transcript from Google and detailed explanation of the outage.


Were you online at the time of the outage? Are you a developer? How did you do your work for those 47 minutes without Google😁? Come let's chat about this below✌️

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