Google recovers from outage that took down YouTube, Gmail, and Snapchat

YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, Nest, Discord, and a number of other web services suffered from major from outages in the US today. The root cause was issues with Google’s Cloud service that powers apps other than just Google’s own web services. Google’s issues started at around 3PM ET / 12PM PT, and the company resolved them after more than four hours.

The issues largely affected those on the East Coast of the US, but some YouTube and Gmail users across Europe also reported that they were unable to access the services. Google’s own G Suite Status dashboard showed problems with practically every single Google web service at one point, and Down Detector listed YouTube outage reports in a number of countries worldwide.

Discord, Snapchat, and Vimeo users are also affected, as these all use Google Cloud on the backend. Even Shopify experienced problems because of the Google outage, which prevented some stores (both brick-and-mortar and online) from processing credit card payments for hours.

Google blamed “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA” for the issues. “We will conduct a post mortem and make appropriate improvements to our systems to prevent this from happening again,” says a Google spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We sincerely apologize to those that were impacted by today’s issues.”

The problems for YouTube follow high profile outages for the popular video service in January and October. YouTube was down for an hour and a half earlier this year before Google restored service.