Google and Facebook are two of the largest online service on the web. On March 13th, the two suffered outages that panicked the internet.
Around 0800 Pacific Time (1500 UTC), Google said it was "investigating reports of an issue with Gmail" in which some users were seeing error messages, and the webmail platform was running very slowly. Netizens were, at the time, already protesting about Facebook in having high latency and slow in loading.
The Google-owned YouTube also experienced similar slowdowns, and this was followed by Google Drive.
This suggested that Google was experiencing a potential larger issue within its organization's data centers and connectivity links.
Less than two hours later, Google acknowledged the Drive outage, and admitted that Gmail was still experiencing problems, especially when users tried to attach or access files.
Google confirmed this on its G Suite Status Dashboard site that displays performance information for a wide range of Google services.
The site stated that users were seeing “error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.” The company’s Google Cloud Status Dashboard also confirmed the outages.
"We are still seeing the increased error rate with Google App Engine Blobstore API. Our Engineering Team is investigating possible causes," explained Google in a statement on its Cloud Status Dashboard. "Mitigation work is currently underway by our Engineering Team. We will provide another status update by Tuesday, 2019-03-12 20:45 US/Pacific with current details."
It took Google about 3 hours to resolve the problem.
"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," said Google in a statement.
The outages were also related to the attempt by Pakistan's government to block access domestically, which in turn affected other countries. At that time, 70 Internet service providers in Pakistan tried to block YouTube due to an anti-Islamic movie shared on the site, which apparently extended by affecting more than it originally intended.
A Pakistani telecommunications company also made a mistake when it accidentally identified itself to the internet as the world's fastest route to YouTube.
As a result, it sent web traffic to oblivion, shutting down many people's access to the streaming site.
"We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again," YouTube said in a statement, confirming the outage was caused by a network in Pakistan.
We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019
As for Facebook, its social media platform and its properties that include Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, also suffered outages.
During this moment, the services came online to then returned offline repeatedly.
The message "Account Temporarily Unavailable" was displayed to some Facebook users across the globe when they were checking on their pages. "Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes."
Facebook said that its systems were experiencing problems, and its servers failed for some users.
"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," the social giant said.
It took Facebook a little more than 14 hours to completely resolve the issue, before saying that a "server configuration change" was to blame for the outages of its services.
"Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience," explained Facebook.
Unlike Google which provided explanations about its outages, Facebook didn't reveal technical details. This led to speculations that Facebook outages may have been more about conspiracy than system related.
Facebook has declined to comment.
Since Google and Facebook are two of the most popular and the most widely-used services of the web, the outages of the two did sparked complaints from users in numerous forums and boards. Frustrated users also flocked to Twitter to share and express their disappointment.
This incident was indeed a huge loss for Google and Facebook in both reliability and monetary, especially since the two very rarely go offline.