Google suffered major outages with its Cloud Platform this morning, causing widespread access issues with both its own services and third party apps ranging from Snapchat to Discord.
As of early Monday morning, issues had persisted for hours; according to the Google Cloud Status Dashboard, the outages began at roughly 5:25 AM AEST and were related to “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA.” Outage-tracking service Down Detector indicated that access to YouTube was severely disrupted across the country, with the northeastern U.S. particularly having a rough go of it.
Finally, the G Suite Status Dashboard listed virtually every one of its cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools—including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Hangouts, and Voice—as experiencing service outages. Amazingly enough, largely defunct social network Google+ was listed as experiencing no issues.
As the Verge noted, third-party services Discord, Snapchat, and Vimeo all use Google Cloud in their backends, with the outages preventing users from logging in. (However, issues were far from universal, with some users reporting no impact at all.)
In a statement to Gizmodo and other outlets, the Google press team acknowledged the extent of the outages, reiterated the note about network congestion, and said it had identified the problem and expected it to be resolved quickly.
“Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors,” Google wrote. “We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to return to normal service shortly.”
Major outages with Google services are relatively rare, but as with today’s incident, they tend to highlight just how much of the internet operates under the company’s umbrella or is reliant on their services. In June 2018, Google’s Home and Chromecast services stopped functioning (with Chromecast reportedly down for over eight hours).
Later that year, YouTube was went down hard for over an hour, with videos refusing to load and access problems reported across the globe—a situation that repeated itself earlier this year.
Users across the planet have also reported problems logging into their Gmail accounts on multiple occasions in 2019.
While Google sorts this mess out, disaffected users have a couple of options to occupy their time, including but not limited to going outside or complaining about it on Twitter.