On Sunday afternoon, a mysterious outage hit Google Cloud, affecting many Google and third-party services. The phenomenon was observed in several regions of the US and Europe.
Some of the services affected by the outage included Snapchat, Vimeo, Shopify, Discord, and Pokemon GO. Also, Google's most popular services, including YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, G Suite, Hangouts, Google Drive, Google Docks, Google Nest, and more, were also down.
According to a Google employee, the outage was so severe that it affected the company's internal tools that engineers use to communicate with each other, making the recovery process even more difficult.
“We are experiencing a severe network outage in the eastern US, affecting multiple services including Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube. Users may experience slow performance. We believe we have identified the root cause of the issue and expect to return to normal operation soon.”
The employee added: "It's disrupting everything, including, unfortunately, the tools we usually use to communicate with each other about the holidays.".
The problem appears to be related to an outage at an internet service provider (ISP) in America, which provides connectivity and many other services to Google's data centers.
A similar incident occurred in January. That outage caused operational problems across nearly all Microsoft cloud services. The biggest problems were in Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure Government Cloud.
Regarding yesterday's outage, Google Cloud services were reportedly down for about two hours. The biggest problems were in North America, although some European users also reported problems with the services.
