More About Google Cloud Outages.
kEY POINTS
- On Thursday, Google’s cloud services, along with a number of other cloud providers, were unavailable for an extended period of time.
- A Google status page displayed, “We are experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products,” noting that the outages started at 10:51 a.m. PT.
- Searches for the Google hosting platform “Firebase” surged, according to Google Trends.
On Thursday, Google’s cloud experienced notable worldwide disruptions that either completely knocked down or disrupted several major online services.
“We are experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products,” a Google Cloud status page displayed, saying that the outages started at 10:51 a.m. PT. “Our engineering team is still looking at the problem.”
Google later in the day said that although engineers were trying to restore service, consumers were “still experiencing varying degrees of impact,” and that the business lacked an ETA for the fix.
For Google, which is striving to keep pace in cloud infrastructure with bigger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the disruptions represent a setback. Led by Thomas Kurian, the cloud operation is among Google’s fastest-growing divisions and gains from demand for artificial intelligence goods and services.
Major Google Cloud user Shopify, an e-commerce software provider, reported in an X post that it was “aware of an issue impacting several services.” And OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, reported having some issues with single sign-on “and other log-in methods.”
In a social media post, the business added, “Engineering teams are working to mitigate these issues.”
Though that figure was drastically reduced by early afternoon, the Down detector website displayed over 13,000 recorded events for Google Cloud at almost 11:30 a.m. PT.
A Google spokesman emailed saying, “We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services” and indicated the dashboard for updates.
Alphabet has been cutting back, using layoffs in its sales, customer experience, internal deal, and go-to-market teams, CNBC noted in February. Although Down detector also reported problems with AWS, a business spokesman insisted there were none.
According to Google’s status page, 13 of its cloud services—all throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia—had experienced issues resulting from the event.
Other web services that seemed to suffer difficulties included Amazon’s Twitch, CoreWeave’s Weights and Biases, Elastic, GitLab, LangChain, Microsoft’s GitHub, Replit, and Intuit’s Mailchimp.
Kurian reported on X Thursday night that all services are back up and functioning.
“We have been diligent at work on the outage today, and we are now totally restored across all regions and products,” Kurian said. “We regret causing disturbance to our clients.”
Cloudflare noted on its status page that it was having issues starting late morning Pacific time. One of the main website security and content distribution systems available is Cloudflare. On Thursday the stock dropped five percent.
A Cloudflare spokesman told CNBC, “This is a Google Cloud outage,” adding that the “limited” number of services leveraging Google Cloud were affected. Its fundamental offerings kept running as usual.
“We are seeing a number of services suffer intermittent failures,” Cloudflare’s page noted. “We are still looking at this; we will update this list as we evaluate the effect on a per-service level.”
Users Googling “Firebase,” one of Google’s developer tools for creating and running web and mobile apps, showed a surge, according to Google Trends.
