Google recovers from four hour cloud outage

The Alphabet subsidiary blamed the downtime on network congestion

Google has resolved a cloud outage that sent a large portion of Google services offline and disrupted several popular apps dependent on them, including Shopify, Snapchat and Discord.

The blackout began around 10.30pm Sunday (BST), affecting Gmail, Youtube, G-Suite and Google Cloud.

During the outage, users, particularly on the east coast of the US, said they were unable to access Google services or experienced extremely slow connections. The outage affected other services hosted on Google Cloud, including Nest, the home automation company owned by Google.

Through a series of visualisations on Twitter, digital experience monitoring company ThousandEyes revealed how the outage had affected users across the world.

The Alphabet subsidiary blamed the issue on “network congestion” and said they had a resolved the issue for the vast majority of users within a few hours.

“We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence,” the company said in a statement.

“We will provide a detailed report of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. This detailed report will contain information regarding SLA credits.”

As both Google’s cloud and consumer services were affected, it is believed the problem was related to the company’s core network.

The fact that Google cloud customer workloads and Google’s own workloads were taken out simultaneously gives credence to the company’s claim that it does not prioritise between them in the event of an issue.

More and more technology organisations are shifting important workloads, such as those that power popular mobile applications, onto the public cloud. If these workloads are loaded on to just one company’s servers, these firms benefit from cost efficiencies but are highly dependent on that provider in order to operate.

It the world of enterprise IT, it has long been considered best practice to have backups of mission-critical workloads sitting on-premise or on other cloud platforms in order to distribute dependencies.