Google Workspace quota outage restored
A campus reported losing student and staff access after exceeding Google Workspace storage quotas, and access was later restored—underscoring that quota enforcement can disrupt classroom services. The incident highlights operational risk when unlimited education storage assumptions end. (theeyeopener.com)
TMU’s published quota table shows role-based limits: students, staff, retirees and department accounts were set to 1 TB with implementation on October 9, 2023, faculty and contract lecturers moved to 1 TB on February 19, 2024, shared drives to 1 TB on May 23, 2023, and alumni were capped at 30 GB on October 9, 2023. (torontomu.ca) TMU’s Computing and Communications Services says it worked “with Google to analyse our current storage usage and to develop strategies and limits,” and lists Help Desk contact numbers (students: 416-979-5000 x556840; faculty: 416-979-5000 x556806) for affected users. (torontomu.ca) Google’s guidance for education customers describes a baseline pooled allocation (100 TB) for school domains, a change many campuses have implemented into per-user or per-domain quotas rather than relying on “unlimited” domains. (support.google.com) University IT reports from other campuses show how enforcement behaves in practice: Stanford’s admins say any drive exceeding a 5 TB threshold will switch to read-only and that in-app alerts appear at 80% and 100% of the limit. (uit.stanford.edu) TMU’s outage report to students described the domain reaching its capacity and editing being disabled; the student-facing article reported the domain limit at about 1.08 petabytes and an official email timestamped 3:11 p.m. during the March 27, 2026 incident. (theeyeopener.com) Other institutions have translated Google’s policy into concrete caps and enforcement dates—California State East Bay documented limits that took effect November 30, 2024 with uploads/sync blocked when limits are exceeded, and Morgan State posted per-student allocations (new students 25 GB, one-time adjustments for current students up to 1 TB). (csueastbay.edu) (morgan.edu) Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard and public monitoring sites showed no simultaneous global service outage for Docs/Drive around the TMU event, indicating the disruption aligned with domain quota enforcement rather than a platform-wide outage. (google.com) (downdetector.com)
