The biggest cloud service providers, Google Cloud has been attacked by a mysterious outage which also affected thousands of sites, including Google and non-Google services.
This incident affected Google's own services such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, G Suite, Hangouts, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Nest, and others as well as Snapchat, Vimeo, Shopify, Discord, Pokemon GO, Uber and many.
Reports also showed that Snapchat-related complaints had peaked at more than 48,000 before falling to about 1,800 as of 9 pm EDT on Sunday. Even many users took to Twitter to complain about the issue under the hashtag #YouTubeDOWN.
A Google employee revealed that the mysterious outage was so severe that it also took down internal tools, which the Google engineers were using to communicate among each other about the outage, making the recovery process even more difficult.
"We're having what appears to be a serious networking outage. It's disrupting everything, including unfortunately the tooling we usually use to communicate across the company about outages.
"There are backup plans, of course, but I wanted to at least come here to say: you're not crazy, nothing is lost (to those concerns downthread), but there is serious packet loss at the least. You'll have to wait for someone actually involved in the incident to say more."
As per the report, the networking issue is apparently related to an outage at Level 3, which is US-based ISP that provides connectivity and various other services to Google data centres.
A similar issue occurred in January that caused authentication services to go down for all Microsoft cloud services. This outage mostly affected Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure Government Cloud.
In March, social media giant Facebook blamed a "server configuration change" for a massive outage that affected its applications around the world.
However, the Google Cloud Platform services have been down since Monday morning. Even though some European users reported few problems, the Google employee who mentioned the outage issue, stated that "this outage doesn't appear to be global, but it is hitting us particularly hard in parts of the US."
Later, the company said in a statement that "The network congestion issue in the eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00 pm US/Pacific."
