Yesterday, Google Cloud Platform reported significant disruptions to its services across the entire globe, affecting many different popular websites. Users also reported widespread problems accessing many Google services such as the popular video conferencing platform Google Meet. So far, the technology giant Google has not provided an official explanation for the extensive and very widespread GCP service outages. If you noticed that some of your favorite sites and apps also stopped working this afternoon, you are not alone in this experience. It seemed like practically the entire internet went down, including Google Cloud, OpenAI, Twitch, Discord, Nintendo, and also the music service Spotify.
On its official Google Cloud status page, the service first admitted to having “service issues” at 2:46 p.m. Eastern Time.
According to subsequent updates, their engineers “have identified the root cause and have applied appropriate mitigations” to the problem. However, the company also noted that they did not have an estimated time for a full service recovery for all affected users. Meanwhile, a Google Cloud representative told the news outlet Mashable, “We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services.”
The affected areas included regions all across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and also both North and South America.
Popular online services across the globe were disrupted on Thursday due to these ongoing issues at the Google Cloud platform. Tens of thousands of users of Spotify, Discord and other platforms began noticing issues with their services early in the afternoon. Outage reports for the music streamer Spotify in particular, peaked at around 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time before dropping off. At this time, we do not know the cause of the Google Cloud issues or the more widespread problems that were reported. An update posted later to the Google Cloud status page stated that they had implemented a mitigation for the widespread issue.
The Google Cloud service page later posted another update saying that, “most of the Google Cloud products have confirmed full service recovery.” Google’s Cloud status page said an incident with their systems had affected clients in the U.S. and also many different countries abroad. Google Cloud, which hosts a significant amount of services on the internet, has become the fastest growing part of Alphabet Inc. The company has promised that it will publish a full analysis of this incident once they have completed their internal investigation. The company later reported that all the services are fully recovered from the major service issue that had affected so many users.
Reference:
