Spotify, Discord, and others are coming back online after a brief Google Cloud outage

Sites and services like Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Etsy seem to be recovering after an outage that brought them, and many other sites, down for a little less than an hour on Tuesday.

The culprit for the outages appears to have been Google Cloud, and the service’s status page still shows a networking issue is currently causing problems resulting in the 404 errors that appeared on affected web pages. An update to the status page posted at 1:17PM ET says “the issue with Cloud Networking is partially resolved,” and it does seem like most services are coming back to life, albeit with some experiencing a few bugs or long loading times. Google’s status page notes that there currently isn’t an ETA on when the problem will be fully fixed.

A peek at DownDetector shows the sprawling impact of the issue, with everything from Pokémon Go to Home Depot experiencing issues. We’ve reached out to some of the affected companies and will update this post as more information becomes available.

Google Cloud Status Dashboard:

Summary: Global: Experiencing Issue with Cloud networking

Description: We are experiencing an issue with Cloud Networking beginning at Tuesday, 2021-11-16 09:53 US/Pacific.

Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue.

We will provide an update by Tuesday, 2021-11-16 10:40 US/Pacific with current details.

We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.

Diagnosis: Customers may encounter 404 errors when accessing web pages.

Workaround: None at this time.

The tracker showed that many of the services started experiencing issues at the same time, which points to a common provider experiencing issues, rather than something like an ISP disruption or individual sites coincidentally having issues at the same time. Similar to previous outages that came from problems at Fastly or AWS, the reliance of services on other providers can help them offer content at a massive scale, but if there’s a problem, then all of them can go down at once.

Update November 16th, 1:30M ET: Noted updates from Google Cloud and that services are coming back online.