'Network congestion' blamed for Google Cloud outage that affected YouTube, Snapchat and G Suite

Google Cloud outage lasted more than four hours on Sunday and affected Snapchat, Discord, Shopify, Vimeo and Pokemon Go as well as Google's own services

Google claims 'network congestion' was the cause of a Google Cloud outage on Sunday that took down YouTube, Snapchat, G-Mail and many other cloud services.

The incident lasted for more than four hours yesterday, starting at 12.25pm (US Pacific time) and ending at 4.45pm.

Google said says it will conduct a full inquiry into the outage and take all necessary measures to prevent or minimise a recurrence of such incidents in future.

"We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimise future recurrence.

A Google employee said that the outage was so severe that it even disrupted internal tools that engineers use

"We will provide a detailed report of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. This detailed report will contain information regarding SLA credits," Google said in a statement posted to its Google Cloud Platform.

Earlier on Sunday, users on the US East Coast region reported problems in accessing Google services, including G Suite, Gmail, Nest, YouTube, Google Search, Hangouts, Google Docs, Google Drive and others.

The issue was not confined to Google's own services, but also a large number of companies that rely on the Google Cloud, including Snapchat, Discord, Shopify, Vimeo and Pokemon Go.

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Google admitted that it was experiencing high levels of congestion, implying that the root cause of the issue had been identified. However, it didn't provide any further information on the issue.

According to Down Detector, users in North America were most affected by the outage, although the issue also disturbed services in some parts of South America and Europe.

Social media users were quick to express their frustrations and soon the hashtag #YouTubeDOWN became one of the Twitter's trending topics in the US.

After the issue was resolved, YouTube claimed in a tweet that the service was "back and working again for the large majority of people" and any remaining issue "should be fixed soon".

In a HackerNews post, a Google employee said that the outage was so severe that it even disrupted internal tools that engineers use internally to communicate with each other, thereby making the recovery process more difficult.

The networking issue seems to be related to a Level 3 Communications outage. Earlier this year, a similar Level 3 issue caused disruption in authentication services for all Microsoft cloud services. The issued affected Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Azure Government Cloud.

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