It’s back on now. It was brief but probably damaging if it lasted longer
Yesterday, a sudden and brief Google Cloud outage caused popular websites and apps like Discord and Spotify to go down. The outage lasted less than an hour but had it lasted longer, it would have been severely damaging for every company affected, most especially Google.
Users started noticing issues Tuesday, 17th November, starting around 1 PM ET, and Google noticed the issue 10 minutes later. According to DownDetector, several companies have experienced the issue, ranging from Spotify all the way to Pokemon Go and Home Depot.
The Google Cloud website shows the status and stability of the cloud-based service. The error has thankfully been resolved quickly. An update released around 1:17 PM ET said that the issue had been “partially resolved”. During that time, it seems like every service and website that uses the Google Cloud for their servers have returned to normal. It’s scary and fascinating to think how our world is dependent on Google alone. That’s how big they are, and when they disappear off the map, the results are devastating. A similar outage happened last year, where almost all Google services couldn’t be used, therefore multiple employees and students couldn’t do their jobs and have lost plenty of time for it.
By 3:18 PM ET, the issue has been fully resolved. Google also released a statement: “We will publish an analysis of this incident, once we have completed our internal investigation”.