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Google services, ProtonMail and ProtonVPN suffered an outage yesterday

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Yesterday, Google reported that it is facing an issue with authentication to Google App Engine sites, Identity Aware Proxy, the Google Cloud Console, and Google OAuth 2.0 endpoints. This began at 11:30 PT yesterday and it ended at 1:27 PT.

With Google, ProtonMail and ProtonVPN also experienced an outage yesterday. Due to the server failure, few accounts were temporarily unavailable. Proton’s infrastructure team found out the issue and fixed it and the systems are now functioning normally. The official post reads, “We apologize for the inconvenience. No emails or data were lost, but some incoming emails may be delayed.”

Google Cloud Status Dashboard reads, “We are currently experiencing an issue with authentication to Google App Engine sites, the Google Cloud Console, Identity Aware Proxy, and Google OAuth 2.0 endpoints.”

DownDetector confirmed that there is an outage in some parts of the world and few users on Twitter confirmed the news.

Services like Google, Google Drive, and Gmail experienced issues. Few users weren’t able to access the services and others faced slow loading times.

Google’s OAuth which is used for Google Sign-In services failed yesterday, so a lot of users were unable to log in. OAuth is used for signing in to Google services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Chromebooks. It is also used by other applications when users use Google to log into them. And if any issues come up in OAuth then users will not be able to log into any of the above-mentioned services.

At 12:18 PT, few customers reported that they could successfully attempt to utilize an incognito window under the Chrome browser to log in. At 12:43 PT, the team reported that mitigation work was on and error rates have fallen down.

This outage is the fourth one in a row, last month, Google suffered an outage as an issue was reported with Cloud Networking and Load balancing within us-east1. Just two months ago Google Calendar was down for almost three hours around the world. In the same month, Google Cloud suffered major outage which took down many Google services including YouTube, GSuite, Gmail, etc.

Yesterday at 1:27 PT, the team updated, “The issue with authentication to Google App Engine sites, the Google Cloud Console, Identity Aware Proxy, and Google OAuth 2.0 endpoints has been resolved for all affected customers as of Monday, 2019-08-19 12:30 US/Pacific. We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence.”

Few users are sceptical about the company’s recent outages, a user commented on HackerNews, “Google often has a outage or two around this time of the year when all the US schools come back and millions of students log in at the same time.”

Another user commented, “It sure feels like there have been quite a few big outages this summer (Google in particular). I wonder if they are getting sloppy or this is just bad luck?”