A massive Google Cloud outage caused several major websites, such as Spotify, Snapchat and Discord, to crash for several hours on Tuesday afternoon.
Google Cloud’s service page showed the culprit is a networking issue that is impacting nearly a dozen sites and tens of thousands of users worldwide.
The problem started after 12pm ET, causing 404 errors on webpage, but websites affected by the networking outage seemed to be back online around 2:30pm – some users may still be experiencing issues.
Many of the services were aware of the outage, sharing the information on Twitter, but have not said when the issues will be fixed.
Google Cloud’s networking malfunction follows an even larger online fiasco that saw all of Meta’s platforms – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – go down in a seven-hour-long global outage.
A massive Google Cloud outage caused several major websites, such as Spotify, Snapchat and Discord, to crash on Tuesday afternoon
Google released a statement on its Cloud dashboard at 12:10pm ET, acknowledging the networking error.
‘We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption,’ the page reads.
‘Diagnosis: Customers may encounter 404 errors when accessing web pages. Workaround: None at this time.’
According to the Verge, many of the outages shown on DownDetector, a web-based service that monitors online outages, coincides with when Google Cloud started experiencing an issue.
Google Cloud’s service page shows the culprit is a networking issue (pictured) that is impacting nearly a dozen sites and thousands of users worldwide
The issue started after 12pm ET and is causing 404 errors on webpages. Pictured is an outage map for Spotify
Many of the services are aware of the outage, sharing the information on Twitter, but have not said when the issues will be fixed. Pictured is an outage map for Discord
The problem started after 12pm ET, causing 404 errors on webpage, but websites affected by the networking outage seemed to be back online around 2:30pm. Pictured is the outage map for Snapchat
Approximately seven minutes after Google Cloud shared its first update about the networking issue, it posted ‘the issue with Cloud Networking is partially resolved.’
‘Customers will be unable to apply changes to their load balancers until the issue is fully resolved,’ reads the post.
‘We do not have an ETA for full resolution at this point.’
Spotify said it was aware of ‘some issues right now and are checking them’, after more than 50,000 users reported they were facing issues.
‘Many Snapchatters are having trouble using the app. Hang tight, we’re working on a fix. In the meantime, we recommend staying logged in,’ Snapchat support said in a tweet.
The outage was causing error 404 messages to appear on websites
Spotify said it was aware of ‘some issues right now and are checking them’, after more than 50,000 users reported they were facing issues
Many users have flocked to Twitter to share their frustrations with the outage
The Google Cloud outage comes just a little over a month from the Meta crash that saw its three apps crash for seven hours due to issues with its Domain Name System (DNS).
Meta does not use CloudFare but it runs one of the world’s largest DNS resolvers. When sites go down because of failures in DNS systems, CloudFare tries to repair them.
Usman Muzaffar, SVP of engineering at CloudFare, told DailyMail.com at the time: ‘Humans access information online through domain names, like facebook.com and DNS converts it into numbers, called an IP address, computers use.
‘From what we understand of the actual issue —it is a globalized BGP configuration issue. In our experience, these usually are mistakes, not attacks.
‘Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol for the Internet. Much like the post office processing mail, BGP picks the most efficient routes for delivering Internet traffic.
Initially, there were reports that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile were all down too – however those reports stemmed from people being unable to access Facebook-run apps on their mobile devices.
The Google Cloud outage comes just a little over a month from the Meta crash that saw its three apps crash for seven hours due to issues with its Domain Name System (DNS)
Last month’s Meta outage was so intense, even CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged it on Facebook
After hours of the shutdown, technicians attempted a ‘manual reset’ of its servers on that resolved the issue.
‘Today, the directions for how to get to Facebook’s DNS server’s addresses weren’t available (and seem to still be unavailable).
‘Without being able to contact the DNS servers, visitors trying to reach a Facebook property, like facebook.com, will not get an answer and so the page won’t load.’
