Google Cloud Outage Disrupts Major Internet Services: What Broke, Why It Happened, and Is It Fixed Now

Google Cloud Services are back up, but what really happened?  Still a secret. If you recently tried to send an email, or open a Google Doc or watch a YouTube video and then met a wall- you weren’t alone. 

What happened?

Google, late Thursday night, had a major outage that affected many of its main services around the world, including Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, and even some aspects of Google Cloud.  The good news?  Everything is working again.  The bad news? We still don't know what caused it all to happen in the first place. 

According to Downdetector, the website that monitors outages and service disruptions, the issues peaked between 12am to 3am. The tracker recorded 79 per cent of users facing issues with server connection, 11 per cent having problems with file access and 10 per cent struggling with hosting Google Cloud services. 

Various services like Google, Twitch, Discord, AWS, Cloudfare and OpenAI were impacted by the outage. Google confirmed a 7-hour disruption of its services. 

What Caused the Outage?

Google has publicly said that the outage happened and that the problem has been fixed.  The corporation has not spoken much yet about the "why"- the true technical reason for the disruption.  Google claimed in a brief update on its service status dashboard that the "root cause" had been "identified" and "mitigations were applied." 

In other words, they found out what went wrong and remedied it.  But what else?  Nothing. The corporation said, "We will publish an analysis of this incident once our internal investigation is finished."  So, in other words, they are working on a comprehensive postmortem, but we don't know anything right now.  

At the time of writing this article, all of the services that were disrupted seem to be stable and working fine.  If you're still having problems, they are probably local or limited to a small area. 

Read more: Ahead of iPhone 17 Launch, iPhone 16 Gets Flat Rs 9,901 Discount