Google has just recovered from a widespread outage that affected access to many of its services and Google Cloud-powered apps in parts of the United States.
Some parts of the country were previously unable to access Google services due to problems with the Google Cloud service.
Since this cloud platform also powers many other services beyond just Google's own, other websites were also experiencing outages.
Google Cloud Outages
Google issued a status update on its Cloud dashboard shortly after the outages occurred, noting the issues started at around 3:25 p.m. ET, or 12:25 p.m. PT.
The problem was first reported by users in the East Coast around afternoon, but reports from outage monitor DownDetector indicate that more regions may have been affected as well.
Google explained that the outages root from a multi-region issue with the Google Compute engine.
"We are experiencing high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple service in Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube," said the company. "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."
Not Just Google
Most of the affected sites are in-house services such as YouTube, Gmail, and G Suite, but it also extended to Discord, Snapchat, and Vimeo, since, as mentioned, they all piggyback off Google Cloud on the backend. The issues were mostly noticeable in the United States and Europe, with no major reports from countries beyond those two as of yet.
Thankfully, these services now seem to be back up and running again, and that's no surprise, given internet outages rarely last long. What's surprising, though, is that these issues have occurred more than once for Google in recent months. In October 2018, for instance, YouTube faced some unexpected downtime, Then the following month, Google's overall services went offline due to a routing issue. Also in January this year, YouTube was down an hour and a half before Google was able to eventually restore the service back to normal.
Nest, which Google owns, also went through a series of outages in late 2018 and early 2019.
Google Cloud is the company's hosting platform, similar to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. A bunch of apps rely on this platform as a backend, including Uber and the aforementioned ones up top.
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