A lot of products today rely on Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services to operate. Several smaller companies opt for the above services to save on massive datacenter operation and software development costs. However, when either of the services goes down, it has a dominoes effect and takes down others relying on it. Some time ago, an outage was reported on Google Cloud Platform, which is host to several services including notable ones such as Spotify, Snapchat, Discord and even Pokemon Go. The outage was first spotted around two hours ago, and Google acknowledged it shortly after via the following Tweet
Hi Jacob, the Support Team is posting updates about the Google Stackdriver issue on the Status Dashboard: https://t.co/ceYZ1ZNMeT. I recommend checking there for updates. -LC
— Google Cloud (@googlecloud) July 17, 2018
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Of all the services Google Cloud offers, Google App Engine, Cloud Networking, and Stackdriver were affected. More details on what each one of them does can be found below.
- Google App Engine: Build and deploy applications on a fully managed platform. Scale your applications seamlessly from zero to planet scale without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. With zero server management and zero configuration deployments, developers can focus only on building great applications without the management overhead. App Engine enables developers to stay more productive and agile by supporting popular development languages and a wide range of developer tools.
- Google Cloud Networking: Google’s high quality private network connects our regional locations to more than 100 global network points of presence close to your users. Google Cloud Platform also uses state-of-the-art software-defined networking and distributed systems technologies to host and deliver your services around the world. Google global VPC leverages the Google-owned global high-speed network to link your applications across regions—privately and reliably.
- Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster. It is natively integrated with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and popular open source packages. Stackdriver provides a wide variety of metrics, dashboards, alerting, log management, reporting, and tracing capabilities.
What’s worse is that Google’s enterprise support page was also down at the same moment. Anyone seeking help via official channels was unable to do so, which is why users took to Twitter to voice their concerns. The outage has now been fixed and Google states that all services should be functional in some time.
