Google Cloud Outage Disrupts Spotify, Snapchat, Gmail; Indian Users Impacted

A Google Cloud outage disrupted several services like Snapchat, Spotify, Discord, OpenAI, and more. The tech giant’s own services like Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, and Nest were also affected. The company acknowledged the issue and assured that its engineers were working on rectifying it. Several Indian users reported on Downdetector of the outage, including many from the US region as well. Service provider Cloudfare also shared an analysis on what caused the outage.

It is important to note that all of the services have now resumed and are working fine. The outage stopped several services from working for a few hours last night, particularly for 2 hours 28 minutes according to Cloudfare. A Cloudfare representative told CNN, “This is a Google Cloud outage. A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”

Google was sharing updates on its Cloud status page and it mentioned the root cause was identified and that the engineers were working to rectify it. In some regions, the services were working but users were experiencing slower response times. The latest update on Google Cloud is that all of the ‘services are fully recovered’.

In addition, Google wrote, “Vertex AI Online Prediction is full recovered as of 18:18 PDT. All the services are fully recovered from the service issue. We will publish analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue.”

While Google was rectifying the issue, Internet users claimed that the downtime was caused by a large-scale cyberattack. However, these are just theories and the downtime was due to a technical glitch in Google’s Cloud service.

Cloudfare has shared an analysis of the service outage and has apologised for the same. “We’re deeply sorry for this outage: this was a failure on our part, and while the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them,” Cloudfare noted on its blog.