2020 Google services outages

During three episodes in 2020, Google suffered from severe outages that disrupted various of their services. The first was a Gmail/Google Drive outage in August, the second, in November, affected mainly YouTube; and the third, in December, affected most of their services. These outages seemed to be global.
August 2020 services outage
On 20 August 2020, over a period of approximately six hours, a global outage abruptly disrupted Google's suite of services, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Meet and Google Voice. The outage is reported to have started around 06:30 UTC. Google acknowledged the worldwide disruption in the G Suite Status Dashboard. Users complained that they were unable to upload files to Gmail, transfer files, and upload files to Google Drive. There were also reports that some users were unable to log in to their Gmail accounts. The reason for the technical issue is not publicly known. For users in India, a Gmail outage had occurred one month prior, in July.
November 2020 YouTube/Google TV outage
On 11 November 2020, another outage occurred on YouTube, YouTube Music, YouTube TV, Google TV and Google Play. The outage started at roughly 12:20 UTC. Users experienced problems playing videos, error messages, and errors that caused loading loops. At 04:13 UTC, YouTube gave the all-clear on its Twitter.
December 2020 services outage
On 14 December 2020, another global outage occurred, affecting authenticated users of most Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Play. The problem was due to a failure in Google Accounts; services such as YouTube were still accessible with private browsing. Google Workspace Status Dashboard showed all services as operational for approximately 40 minutes before correctly reporting their status as down. The outage started at approximately 11:45 UTC, and Google services were restored around 13:00 UTC.
Google identified the issue as an accidental reduction of capacity on their central user ID management system, causing requests that required OAuth-based authentication to fail; this also included the Google Cloud Platform.
On 15 December 2020, many emails sent to Gmail servers reported a 550 error code, which incorrectly indicates that the email address does not exist.

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