Student life was abruptly interrupted today after Google crashed, simultaneously affecting Google Drive, Gmail and Trinity’s MyZone service.
The outage began around 11.45am today and lasted – for most – until 12.50pm, affecting Ireland, the UK, Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia.
In an email statement, Catherine O’Mahony, a Trinity media relations officer, said that the IT service desk in Trinity received a number of calls around midday and “put up an alert as soon as we had verified the issue”.
“We will continue to update our ‘IT Service Alerts’ as we obtain more information on this unprecedented disruption to Google services”, she added.
Most users had had their MyZone service restored in between 40 and 60 minutes.
In a statement on its website, IT Services said: “We apologise 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.”
MyZone is the email service for Trinity students. Email addresses under the MyZone umbrella end in @tcd.ie. Trinity sends official emails to this account.
Google hosts the service and gives students access to features such as Google Drive.
In a tweet, Youtube, which was also affected by the crash, said this afternoon: “Update – We’re back up and running! You should be able to access YouTube again and enjoy videos as normal.”
Outage monitoring website DownDetector states that more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected across the world.
A Google spokesperson told the Irish Independent: “Today, Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period.”
“All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future.”
