Dubai: Digital platforms such as YouTube, Snapchat and Gmail suffered intermittent outages on Sunday afternoon as a result of issues with Google Cloud, which supports a number of internal and external web services. While Google said that the issue was resolved in around four hours, the Down Detector was still showing significant outages for a number of web services across Western Europe even on Monday morning.
In a statement to Gulf News, a spokesperson for the company blamed the issues on “high levels of network congestion in eastern USA”. It promised to “conduct a post-mortem and make appropriate improvements to our systems to prevent this from happening again. We sincerely apologise to those that were impacted by today’s issues.”
However, the issue appeared to be persisting, with one Twitter user writing on Monday afternoon: “I guess snapchat is still down since last night.”
In the UAE, Snapchat was still showing light outages in Dubai and Al Ain on Monday afternoon, while some users were reporting service disruptions on YouTube in Abu Dhabi, according to Down Detector. It was not clear if these outages were related to Sunday’s issues.
One Twitter user complained on Sunday of not being able to access Snapchat, the popular photo messaging platform, from Abu Dhabi. “Is it me or snap chat isn’t working in Abu Dhabi,” wrote a user named Mazada. “#snapchatdown,” she added.
In addition to supporting its own web services like Gmail, Google’s Cloud service also hosts external platforms such as Snapchat, Discord, Vimeo, and Shopify, an e-commerce software provider. Shopify’s outage reportedly prevented some shops from processing credit card payments for a number of hours, according to tech news site “The Verge”.
In a further testament to modern society’s reliance on internet-connected technologies, people reported being unable to use their Nest thermostats or open the Nest smart locks on their doors, as a direct result of the service disruption to Google Cloud.
Others were quick to point out, however, that those users could simply get up, walk over to their thermostats, and manually change the temperature.
In March, Facebook was forced to deny it had been the victim of a cyberattack after its family of apps — WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger — suffered service outages for nearly eight hours, in one of the company’s longest ever downtimes.
Users around the world reported experiencing issues sending messages on Messenger and WhatsApp. The social networking giant’s photo-messaging app Instagram also had service issues.
