Major Google Cloud Outage: Takes Down Snapchat, YouTube, Uber & More

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As of 22:57 BST Google’s Cloud Compute service has been having issues for over 2 hours 30 minutes.

This is a significant outage since large online services such as Snapchat, Uber, Vimeo, Shopify, Google Drive, Gmail, Discord and CrunchyRoll operate on Google’s Cloud Compute services rather than their own. So forth, these companies and their services are now at the mercy of Google’s engineers being able to fix this issue promptly.

This is commonplace in the age of cloud computing where almost all major online names will host their services on either Amazon’s AWS, Google’s Cloud Platform or Microsoft’s Azure.

Google’s update on this issue can be found here and reads as below:

“We are experiencing high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple service in Google Cloud, GSuite and YouTube. Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to a return to normal service shortly.”

Google has yet to comment on the full details of the issue and has only stated the above with a reference to ‘high levels of network congestion’. Due to this, it’s highly unlikely that the issue is down to a hack or any malicious intent but more likely some sort of significant network configuration issue within Google’s data centres. Even with extreme levels of redundancy and backup lines, network issues can often have a domino effect and spread quickly.

To see for yourself the number of services affected then head over to DownDetector where you’ll see a similar pattern from the downtime graphs for each service which is hosted in Google’s Cloud Compute Platform.

Hopefully, Google will have their networking issue for their Cloud Compute services resolved soon and we can all go back to enjoying the internet as usual.

 

Update from Google at 22:58 BST

“We continue to experience high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube. Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. Our engineering teams have completed the first phase of their mitigation work and are currently implementing the second phase, after which we expect to return to normal service. We will provide an update at 16:00 US/Pacific.”

 

Update from Google at 00:00 (Midnight) BST

“The network congestion issue in eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00pm US/Pacific.

We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence. We will provide a detailed report of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. This detailed report will contain information regarding SLA credits.”