By K. Lutz

Disclaimer: The Google Workspace outage actually happened but Lachemi refuses to admit he tripped on a wire so that part is either not true or just unconfirmed. 

Access to the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) Google Workspace was temporarily paused after the school announced that the outage resulted from the university exceeding its 1.08 petabyte storage limit.

While access has now been restored, it was also revealed that the true cause of the outage was not a storage limit but instead the president & vice-chancellor Mohamed Lachemi tripping comically on a wire within the Computing and Communications Services (CCS) office.

Brian Lesser, chief information officer at the CCS, said Lachemi happened to be in their office at the time for a general checkup on how things were going.

“He came in hot, like he had just downed two double-double’s and a farmer’s wrap from Tim’s and it just wasn’t sitting right in his Latummi,” said Lesser. “Next thing I knew he was running through our office looking for the nearest place to empty his Labowels and the entire Google Workspace was down.” 

Lesser added that while the fix for the issue was simply to plug it back into the wall, but before he could, Lachemi commandeered the situation and began crying, weeping and pleading for everyone in the office to keep his embarrassment a secret. 

“He kept going on about how Roberta would never let him out of the office anymore if she found out,” one CCS worker said.

“There was a point where he actually got into the fetal position on the floor and sucked his thumb until we all ‘pinky promised’ that we would keep it a secret,” another said.

When asked why he was in such a rush that he tripped on the wire, Lachemi explained that he was dealing with important “presidential matters.”

“If you must know I was running to catch a rare Torkoal on Pokémon GO and I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings, only the Torkoal. I mean come on, it’s a Torkoal. When else am I going to get one of those?” Lachemi said. 

Mike Donaldson, a third-year computer engineering student said the outage had interrupted his studies but when he found out Lachemi had made the mistake, he was rather amused.

“I was working on one assignment for this class I hate and just as I was trying to switch to another one, I couldn’t open anything,” he said. “Then I found out it was Lachemi who caused the whole thing and I started live hate-tweeting about him on Threads.”

“It also didn’t really matter because I was going to watch reels until I passed out on my aunt’s couch instead of working anyway,” he added.

All files are once again accessible in Google Drive and the CCS has confirmed all wires in the office are now taped to the ground with bright yellow caution tape for safety.