Around 3 pm Eastern Standard Time on June 2, (12.30 am IST on June 3), YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, Nest, Discord and a number of other web services that rely on the Google Cloud Platform suffered major outages in the US. It took more than four hours for the company to resolve the problem. Who was affected? Google Cloud’s official blog reported that YouTube saw a 10% drop in global views during the outage, and Google Cloud Storage saw a 30% reduction in traffic. Only 1% of active Gmail users had problems, while Google Search, a low-bandwidth service, was barely affected. Not only Google properties, but almost all services that run on Google’s Cloud service were affected on the east coast of the US. Some YouTube and Gmail users in Europe also reported problems. Google’s G Suite Status Dashboard showed practically every Google web service was down. Snapchat and Vimeo users were also affected as they use Google Cloud on the backend. Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce firm that also supplies retail point-of-sale systems, was also down. As a result, physical and online stores could not process credit card payments. A Nest user on Y Combinator reported that they couldn’t let guests into their house. (Note that physically letting people in is obviously still possible, but remote access into properties will be disabled by an outage in cloud services.) 9to5Mac reported that many of its iCloud products also experienced problems. Apps were running slower than expected but weren’t completely offline. Apple’s System…
