A problem in the Google Cloud service caused the failure of several websites and services around the world. Spotify, Discord and Snapchat , among others, stopped working for several minutes this Tuesday. While the mobile applications showed various error messages, the webs threw “Error 404”.
Although everything seems to have returned to normal, this type of situation reveals the enormous dependence of certain essential services that the Internet has. In the past, failures at Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly have caused “media” of the Internet to go offline. Now it was the turn of Google Cloud.
When the aforementioned services and applications began to fail on Tuesday, the Google Cloud service status web showed a global problem in Google Cloud Networking. “Customers may encounter 404 errors when accessing the web pages “, the company pointed out, while indicating that there was no alternative solution.
The trusted internet problem tracker, DownDetector, quickly reflected what was happening with various services and applications on the network, as shown in the screenshot below. The users, who are in charge of making the bug reports known, were quickly alerted to the situation.
Credit: DownDetector.com Minutes later, the Google Cloud service status page noted that the engineering team believed the issue was resolved. Even without putting the check in green, Spotify, Discord, Snapchat and the other services gradually came back to life and the “Error 404” messages disappeared.
Why a Google Cloud failure affects the internet?
Google Cloud offers a wide range of scalable cloud-based services. These range from DNS solutions, virtual private networks, hybrid infrastructures, and geographically distributed network servers so that web sites and services can efficiently deliver content across the globe.
According to company reports, this Tuesday's failure occurred in Google Cloud Networking . This is one of the pillars of its cloud service, since it combines data centers connected to Google's physical infrastructure distributed in more than 200 countries with the cloud services required by customers.
Specifically, a setting on the “external HTTP load balancer” “did not take effect.” It is an elementary part of Google Cloud that includes capabilities for traffic management, mirroring, splitting, and header transformations based on requests and responses.
