Meanwhile, Facebook seems to have enough technical debt that it’s blown a Euro-privacy deadline
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Google has revealed the cause of its very unwelcome Gmail outage and on
The Register’s reading of the situation it boils down to forgetting to take an obsolete version of software out of production.
Google’s shorter explanation for the mess is: “Credential issuance and account metadata lookups for all Google user accounts failed. As a result, we could not verify that user requests were authenticated and served 5xx errors on virtually all authenticated traffic.”
The longer version, detailed in Google’s incident report, kicks off by revealing “The Google User ID Service maintains a unique identifier for every account and handles authentication credentials for OAuth tokens and cookies. It stores account data in a distributed database, which uses Paxos protocols to coordinate updates. For security reasons, this service will reject requests when it detects outdated data.”