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

Websites and services like Spotify, Discord, Snapchat and Etsy seem to be recovering from a power outage that brought them, and many other sites, down in just under an hour on Tuesday.

The culprit for the power outage appears to have been Google Cloud, and the service’s status page still indicates that a network issue is currently causing issues resulting in the 404 errors that appeared on affected web pages. An update to the status page that was posted at 13:17 ET says that “the problem with Cloud Networking is partially solved,” and it seems that most services come back to life, albeit with a few errors or long load times. Google̵[ads1]7;s status page notes that there is currently no ETA on when the issue will be completely resolved.

A look at DownDetector shows the comprehensive impact of the issue, with everything from Pokémon Go to Home Depot experiencing issues. We have contacted some of the affected companies and will update this post when more information becomes available.

Google Cloud Status Dashboard:

Summary: Global: Experiencing cloud network issues

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

Our engineering team continues to investigate the problem.

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

We apologize to everyone affected by the disruption.

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

Solution: None at this time.

The tracker showed that many of the services started experiencing issues at the same time, indicating that a regular provider is experiencing issues, rather than something like an ISP outage or individual websites that happened to be experiencing issues at the same time. Like previous power outages that came from problems with Fastly or AWS, reliance on services from other providers can help them offer content on a massive scale, but if there is a problem, everyone can be interrupted at the same time.

Image: DownDetector.com

Update 16 November at 13.30 ET: Listed updates from Google Cloud and that services are returning online.