Google’s outage in numbers

Google’s outage, about 20 – 45 minutes depending on where you are, left a lot of people stranded. The problem was down to an issue with Google’s authentication service. This is the system that allows you to sign in to the very many Google services. We made a video all about it if you want more information:

Google is down! But what killed it?

I thought it would be interesting to look at the impact that Google’s outage had on people the world over. There are a lot of people worldwide who rely on Google’s services, so here is a look at some of the services that were down and the estimated number of people affected.

Gmail

There are an estimated 1.5 billion Gmail users worldwide. It is by far the most popular email service on the planet and here is a spread of the top inbox provider s in 25 countries:

YouTube

According to Social Blade, there are more than 77 million YouTube accounts worldwide. Of the total number of accounts, there are over 46 million creators who are generating US$32 000 in ad revenue a minute according to stats from Alphabet’s Q1 2020 report.

That means YouTube is generating US$44.9 million every single day. If we use those numbers and peg YouTube’s downtime at around 45 minutes then the company and its creators lost US$1.44 million in that short space of time.

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)

There are over 6 million people that use Google Workspace. This number presents paying customers who are in business, different organisations, academic institutions and government agencies.

The outage would have meant that timely communication, access to work files and other essential documents were unavailable for the the duration of the outage.

This is just one event, but with Workspace already struggling to keep pace with Microsoft’s Office Suite and Office 365. Those who work exclusively from the cloud who were affected by the outage might seriously consider switching. On the other hand, Google got it back up quicker than I thought. I was expecting the outage to last a little longer than it did. This might buy Google a reprieve with its customers.

These are, of course, not the only services that were affected. But they are, I think, the ones that affect a good number of people.