Google Cloud goes down, taking YouTube, Gmail, Snapchat, and others with it

June 02, 2019

A mysterious outage has hit Google Cloud, one of the biggest cloud service providers on the internet, and thousands of sites have gone down as a result, including both Google and non-Google services.

Affected companies include some of the biggest names around, such as Snapchat, Vimeo, Shopify, Discord, Pokemon GO; but also most of Google’s own services, like YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, G Suite, Hangouts, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Nest, and others.

In an extreme case of irony, according to a Google employee, the outage was so severe that it also took down internal tools Google engineers were using to communicate among each other about the outage, making recovery efforts even more difficult.

“We’re having what appears to be a serious networking outage,” the Google employee said in a HackerNews post.

“It’s disrupting everything, including unfortunately the tooling we usually use to communicate across the company about outages.”

The networking issue appears to be related to an outage at Level 3, an US-based ISP that provides connectivity and various other services to Google data centers.

In January, a similar Level 3 outage caused authentication services to go down for all Microsoft cloud services, with the most impacted being Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure Government Cloud.

Google Cloud Platform services have been down for at least two hours, at the time of writing. Users in North America are being impacted the most, although some European users also reported scarce problems.

This is a developing story. More updates will follow.