Google outage dampens many web services, including YouTube

Many web services including Snapchat, Gmail, YouTube, Nest, and others underwent a severe outage in the US. It all started with Google’s Cloud service which was the root cause of the outage. Google Cloud is the power source for a number of web services including its own family of apps. The entire thing was down for more than four hours, covering the whole of the US.

It seemed like there was a larger effect on the East Coast. At a certain point, every single Google web service in the G Suite dashboard was down and showed many problems. Apart from the US, people on the European continent also complained about Gmail and YouTube being down. According to Down Detector, the YouTube outage was reported in other countries as well.

A high level of network congestion is the reason for this massive software outage, Google says. More specifically, on the Eastern Coast. What’s worse, other web services including Snapchat, Shopify, Discord, etc. were also down. The problem extended to those who wanted to shop. The credit card payment couldn’t be processed for hours together, dampening many shopping enthusiasts.

YouTube has faced outage a couple of times before. At the beginning of this year, YouTube was down for more than an hour before Google stepped in to restore it. Google has apologized for today’s outage and has assured to make improvements to its systems.