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Google Cloud

Massive Google Cloud Outage Takes Down YouTube, Gmail, and Snapchat In Parts of US (theverge.com) 149

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, Nest, Discord, and a number of other web services are suffering from outages in the U.S. today. The root cause appears to be problems with Google's Cloud service which powers apps other than just Google's own web services. Google has issued a status update on its Cloud dashboard, noting that issues began at around 3:25PM ET / 12:25PM PT.

The issues appear to be mostly affecting those on the East Coast of the US, but some YouTube and Gmail users across Europe are also reporting that they're unable to access the services. Discord and Snapchat users are experiencing issues logging into the apps, and these both use Google Cloud on the backend.

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Massive Google Cloud Outage Takes Down YouTube, Gmail, and Snapchat In Parts of US

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02, 2019 @03:24PM (#58696526)

    Asking for friend.

  • And Canada. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02, 2019 @03:24PM (#58696530)

    And Canada apparently.

    Good news is it isn't my isp dropping the ball for once.

  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday June 02, 2019 @03:29PM (#58696542)

    That's a surprise...

    It's just stupid Youtube and Snapchat though. Nothing important. But just you wait till the data of the company you work for becomes inaccessible for any length of time, and then perhaps IT managers / bean counter / CEOs and other short-sighted "decision maker" will realize why the cloud is a Really Really Bad Idea [tm]

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02, 2019 @03:49PM (#58696626)

      It's all about uptime. Uptime of your local server room or your private rack in a datacenter is not necessarily higher.

      High uptimes require redundancies. Redundancies which you can apply to the cloud much the same as you would to your own hardware.

      Nothing stops snapchat from having a fail-over on a second cloud, like Azure or AWS.

      One thing I do know: scaling that redundant cloud when it goes live is a lot easier and more cost effective than keeping redundant hardware up and running yourself.

      • by XXeR ( 447912 )

        Exactly. The amount of cloud haters on slashdot never ceases to amaze me. There are several workloads that aren't suitable for cloud, no doubt...but to make a blanket statement that cloud is a bad idea shows a complete lack of maturity in the field.

        • The only data that is suitable for cloud:

          1. The kind where it doesn't matter if someone else gets their hands on it.
          2. The kind where it doesn't matter if you can't get your hands on it.

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          Or it shows someone who has actually looked at the value proposition and reliability of the cloud and found it wanting.

          From my analysis, by the time you finish getting nickled and dimed to death it's a bit cheaper to maintain your own. Rental almost always costs more than owning unless the need is temporary.

          That said, cloud as DR makes sense as long as you make sure you have your images tested and ready to go. DR is something you hope to never actually need, and when you do need it, it's a temporary situati

    • So true. âoeThe Cloudâ is merely other peopleâ(TM)s servers. If your business relies on your site being available 24/7/365, build your own infrastructure that YOU own and control.

      Also turn off the Fucking Automatic Updates. When you get yer shit dialed in, the last thing you need is someone fucking it all up by trying to, âoehelpâ.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Aighearach ( 97333 )

        Everybody loves to manage their own email server.

        Remember people chanting "lock her up!" over somebody having taken the important security step of running their own server?

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          If all they could scrape together was an incident when she was five years old and snitched a cookie from Grandma's cookie jar without asking, they would have still been yelling "lock her up!".

    • It's just stupid Youtube and Snapchat though. Nothing important.

      Nest is also down, considering people use it for security that's a bit more important.

      • Not really. Teams of criminals are not waiting on standby to break into the houses of Nest subscribers if the cloud happens to evaporate for awhile. Maybe it can serve as a wakeup call to Nest customers and they will move to real and robust security. It could end up being good for more people than are harmed.

    • by thomst ( 1640045 )

      Rosco P. Coltrane predicted:

      But just you wait till the data of the company you work for becomes inaccessible for any length of time, and then perhaps IT managers / bean counter / CEOs and other short-sighted "decision maker" will realize why the cloud is a Really Really Bad Idea [tm]

      No. No, they won't.

      The kind of psychopathic personality that dominates the executive management ranks of the corporate world is incapable of admitting mistakes. That's why stacked ranking is still a thing. And the ever-increasing disparity between executive compensation and that of line-level IT employees simply reinforces that "smartest guys in the room" mindset ...

  • since it seems to still be up...

  • When Google goes down so you want to jump into company chat to see if anything is giving us issues but then Google Chat is also down. (We use G-Suites for docs/drive/chat/email etc). Good thing we're on AWS though. Mostly not effecting us.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Until AWS goes down...

      Infrastructure for rent is always cheapest possible in its class. It typically ends up costing a lot more.

      • Oh trust me I always bring this up but my boss always says "If AWS is down our customers have bigger problems". I mean we use AWS DNS (Route53) and the HTTPS cert is generated by AWS and paired to the Load Balancer and can't even be downloaded by us for what AWS says is "security". Even if we had an offsite back up of the DB I'd need at least a few hours to spin up a box on another host and wait the nameservers on the domain to propagate. It's actually not a ton of work. About the same amount as on-boarding

      • by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Sunday June 02, 2019 @04:02PM (#58696686)

        Infrastructure for rent is always cheapest possible in its class. It typically ends up costing a lot more.

        I worked at Amazon AWS and I can say that AWS takes resilience VERY seriously. A small company won't be able to match AWS's reliability. Simply because a fully stuffed 24/7 on-call rotation of sysadmins would cost you around a million USD per year.

        AWS is basically becoming something akin to a utility. Sure, you can generate your own power for small-scale operations that don't care about reliability (a generator behind a food truck) or you can do a highly-reliable redundant power supply (emergency batteries and generators in a hospital). But that won't be cheaper than utility power.

        • by DigitalisAkujin ( 846133 ) on Sunday June 02, 2019 @04:13PM (#58696712) Homepage

          On the one hand it's awesome.... I can stand up an RDS instance, get my domain on Route 53, Elasticache for memcached, and codedeploy to deploy my code paired with EC2 load balancers I could quite literally setup an auto scaling solution in like a few hours.... and initially be on the free tier so my first bill might end up being $0.

          I'm just paranoid still. I don't like how the internet is becoming so centralized.

          • by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Sunday June 02, 2019 @04:24PM (#58696752) Homepage Journal

            But can you combine best of breed agile practices into a synergistic mashup to leverage maximum the ROI on your data assets?

            • by DigitalisAkujin ( 846133 ) on Sunday June 02, 2019 @04:56PM (#58696916) Homepage

              I get you're trying to be funny but none of what I said are "buzzwords". Just names of products. So here's a translation

              RDS = Database hosting (with managed backups, cloning, and clusters)
              Route53 = DNS
              Elasticache = Redis / Memcached hosting
              Codedeploy ...... yes deploy your code.
              EC2 = Virtual Server Hosting (with managed backups, load balancing)

            • Most of the people on this site would do it for a pizza and a six-pack of Mt. Dew.

              • Speak for yourself. Some of us are nerds, not IT cowboys.

                • The cultural reference was the soundtrack to the book Netslaves from the late 90s.

                  The track is Subversive Slogans. I'm not sure where a mirror is, if you don't have it in your nerd archive.

                  The quote is, "The difficult we do before lunch. The impossible will cost you a pizza and a six-pack of Mt. Dew."

                  Other quotes:
                  "It's not my life, just 80 hours out of my week."
                  "It's not just a job, it's how I feed my cat."
                  "Netslaves: without us, you'd still be sending away for porn."

                  Sadly, I can't even find it on TPB!
                  You c

          • by Anonymous Coward

            I don't like how the internet is becoming so centralized.

            I don't either, but I think we might as well piss into a firehose for all the difference we're going to make.

        • by melted ( 227442 )

          Horseshit. The secret to having stable infrastructure is to keep it simple and not fuck with it all the time. Any cloud provider "improves" their backend pretty much non-stop, which involves a lot of fucking with some very complex infrastructure. Install a MySQL server locally, set up backups (to cloud, if need be), and you can forget about it for years. If it's not exposed to the public it doesn't really even need updates. But there's no such option in the cloud. Even if you install your stuff in your own

          • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

            Any cloud provider "improves" their backend pretty much non-stop, which involves a lot of fucking with some very complex infrastructure. Install a MySQL server locally, set up backups (to cloud, if need be), and you can forget about it for years.

            You plainly have not been responsible for anything mission-critical. How soon can you replace the hardware if it fails? Do you have an inventory of spare parts in the DC? How soon an admin can get there?

            For perspective, Google's outage lasted less than 2 hours and was not universal.

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Those 2 hours are until the Google cloud is up again. Does not at all imply customer systems in there are functional again.

              • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                So architect your application to be resilient to failures or at least to be autorestartable. You'll need to do this even for a local DC, what if your local server is killed by a power surge?
          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            I fully agree. But KISS has fallen out of fashion. No, there are no better alternatives, just more profitable ones.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Yeah, like that bank that told me they take my security VERY seriously and it took less than 5 minutes to hack their online banking app. No, it was not a small bank. You cannot make that claim without lying or being blind. Your business is selling stuff, not keeping customer stuff running. Sure, it is nice for you if you can do that too, because it makes the selling easier, but in the end, you could not care less. If, on the other hand, the admin staff is actually on the payroll of the customer, that adds a

          • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
            AWS is in the business of selling cloud computing. It's not a monopoly, there's GCE and Azure - both would be glad to eat AWS's clients.
            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              And both provide services of limited quality in just the same fashion, because the economics of the cloud are not nearly as good as is usually claimed. They all understand that they need to keep doing it in this way to continue to have nice profits.

              It it is not a cartel if they coordinate on that without ever talking to each other about it.

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          For a small company, a full staff is one or two people. If you don't abuse the on-call thing, that may not cost you extra. You need those people anyway because the CEO sure as hall can't decipher the interface to the cloud servers.

          AWS has potential to save money, but depending on the load, it also has the potential to be a worse deal than "rent to own" home furnishings.

          • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
            If you're a company with one or two IT people then you also won't care about a one or two hour outage once every couple of years.
            • by sjames ( 1099 )

              You WILL care about paying more than it would cost to own your own server.

              • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                The cheapest servers on AWS are about $3.5 a _month_, with $40 a month buying you a decent server. See: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsa... [amazon.com] - you seriously think it's cheaper to host your own?
                • by sjames ( 1099 )

                  It looks like at the very low end now it might make sense for some people. But as your requirements go up, it starts making less sense, particularly when you remember that the office will need internet connectivity anyway.

                  What does make sense at that point is maintaining an account so that your lead tech can bring things up on Amazon as a DR measure.

                  • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                    As the requirements go up, so do AWS's possibilities. You can use Spot instances for dirt-cheap compute time, you can buy Reserved Instances, use Fargate for intermittent workflows and so on. Even simple on-demand is not that expensive, at $0.25 per hour you have some decent options.

                    If anything, large-scale computing benefits from AWS because you don't have to buy your own hardware that might be useful only for a fraction of time. So even large-scale scientific experiments often simply use AWS (or Azure)
            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              If you're a company with one or two IT people then you also won't care about a one or two hour outage once every couple of years.

              That depends very much on the kind of business you do, not on the size of the company.

              • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                Nope. If you don't have a guaranteed 24/7 staffing then you do NOT care about availability. As simple as that.
      • Until AWS goes down...

        Infrastructure for rent is always cheapest possible in its class. It typically ends up costing a lot more.

        Of course it is. Outsourcing to specialists in the area rather than attempting to roll your own is always the cheapest in class.

        The thing is I'm not sure you know what "cheapest in class" actually means since you're using it in a negative context. You point to AWS being cheapest in class, but you ignore the fact that people *not* using it are in a significantly different, and lower class of service.

        The cloud is someone else's computer. The thing people forget, is that other person is better at looking after

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Your claim that people not using the cloud are automatically in a lower class is either clueless or a direct lie. Sure, they can be lower, but they can also be significantly higher. They may also care about a better customized solution, more redundancy, real network isolation, their own sysadmins that can not only keep stuff running reliably but also competently evaluate what is on offer, etc.

          The cloud is a generic ElCheapo solution. It is suitable if you do not need much control and the mediocre availabili

    • I simply... googled it... and came up with:

      https://www.google.com/appssta... [google.com]

    • When Google goes down so you want to jump into company chat to see if anything is giving us issues but then Google Chat is also down. (We use G-Suites for docs/drive/chat/email etc). Good thing we're on AWS though. Mostly not effecting us.

      FWIW, Google's SREs (sysadmins, sort of) use IRC. Most internal Google communications are on GMail and Google Chat, obviously, but the SRE teams use IRC for a significant part of their comms, specifically so that in the event of a Chat outage, they can still communicate.

    • When Google goes down so you want to jump into company chat to see if anything is giving us issues but then Google Chat is also down. (We use G-Suites for docs/drive/chat/email etc). Good thing we're on AWS though. Mostly not effecting us.

      No thanks. I'll use the opportunity to get some work done instead :-)

  • Probably not where you want your critical servers are located...

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02, 2019 @03:46PM (#58696606)

    Without being able to access the controls for their A/C, they may have to open* their windows!

    *Unless they are Smart Windows and also affected, and assuming they can enter or exit their house without being able to manipulate their Smart Doorlocks.

    captcha: functor

  • by sethmeisterg ( 603174 ) on Sunday June 02, 2019 @03:54PM (#58696642)
    This is not limited to the east coast!
  • Because that is the main priority.
  • From their Nest app on iOS right now: "You’re not connected to the Internet. Check your mobile device settings.” with a “Try Again” button.

    Yes, yes I am. You, on the other hand, are unable to reach your external server address and are blaming the entire internet connection rather than do an “Unable to connect to Nest server”-type error. The mere concept that Nest infrastructure itself could be the problem never enters this app's consciousness.

    The Nest device is fin
    • That isn't arrogance, that's insecurity. They planned ahead to suck, and to try to deflect the blame. LOL

  • by Anonymous Coward
    GMail is not working in Clark County, Washington state.
  • And nothing of value was lost.

  • that I'm so glad to have a hotmail account.

    We don't have these issues... Do we?

  • I felt a great disturbance in the Internet, as if millions of millenials suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

  • I live in Australia and I always know what my offset is from UTC. I assume most people around the world know theirs too.

    What I never know is my offset from PT, CT or ET. Does anyone else have that problem too?

    I guess if this problem was isolated to the U.S.A. then only using local time definitions is OK.

  • I'm primarily an MS stack Azure developer, but the client I'm working with now has been working on duplicating and in some cases moving their Azure services to GCP. Mainly due to the Azure outage that happened earlier this year which as I understand was due to a DNS issue. My clients excuse was that "GCP was more stable." Then this happens in the middle of a go-live for one of the first major projects they've moved over. Had a good laugh over the irony of that one.

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