Google Cloud Network Hit with Outage

By Luke Bellos, Editor, TMCnet  |  November 18, 2021

This week, the widely popular Google (News - Alert) Cloud network experienced a service outage, which resulted in many websites generating error messages when guests visited certain pages.

The service error hit a number of notable websites, including Snapchat, Discord, and Spotify (News - Alert) among others. According to an official incident report, the outage only affected Google network, and was partially fixed roughly twenty minutes later.

“Google Cloud Networking experienced issues with Google Cloud Load Balancing (GCLB) service resulting in impact to several downstream Google Cloud services. Impacted customers observed Google 404 errors on their websites. From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was a latent bug in a network configuration service which was triggered during routine system operation.”

Shortly after revealing a partial resolution to the problem, Google updated the report, stating the issue was fully resolved.

“The issue with Cloud Networking has been resolved for all affected projects as of Tuesday, 2021-11-16 11:28 US/Pacific.”

Although the networking issues were temporary, a number of online business owners affected by the outage turned to social media to voice their concerns about the situation. The incident clearly demonstrates  how many organizations depend on Google services to keep operations afloat.  

The last two decades solidified Google as a leader in almost all areas of digital technology. While certainly still true, this incident should remind users Google is still vulnerable to the same problems facing less prominent service providers.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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