Massive cloud outage knocks out internet services across the globe

Update: At 5 p.m. ET, Google reported positive developments. “We have implemented mitigation for the issue in us-central1 and multi-region/us and are seeing signs of recovery. We have received confirmation from our internal monitoring and customers that the Google Cloud products are also seeing recovery in multiple regions and are also seeing signs of some recovery in us-central1 and multi-region/us.” The tech giant said it expected the recovery to complete within the hour. 

Thursday afternoon, the question wasn’t what’s wrong with what cloud service; it was, what service isn’t down?

Across the social networks, there were numerous reports that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Cloudflare, the content delivery network (CDN), were all down. 

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As one software engineer put it, “How can Google Cloud, AWS, and Cloudflare all be down at the same time? These companies manage nearly 90% of all internet activities and applications.” 

First, this was not just an American problem. Google Cloud reported that it was a global problem. Google stated that Multiple GCP (Google Cloud Platform) products were experiencing impact due to Identity and Access Management Service Issues.

It also didn’t appear to be an internet problem per se. There were no reports of troubles with the Domain Name System (DNS) or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Internet traffic was proceeding as usual. 

At 3:41 p.m. ET, Google said its engineers identified the root cause of the issue, but the problem wasn’t fully resolved, on the Google Cloud status page.

“While our engineers have confirmed that the underlying dependency is recovered in all locations except us-central1, we are aware that customers are still experiencing varying degrees of impact on individual Google Cloud products,” Google said. “All the respective engineering teams are actively engaged and working on service recovery. We do not have an ETA for full service recovery.”

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The AWS Health Dashboard didn’t show any trouble on Downdetector; however, and users reported problems with AWS. Most of these failures appeared to be with the US-East regions. (Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of ZDNET.) AWS, however, stated, “Currently, there are no broad service issues with AWS. Our services are operating normally. The only resource on the internet that provides accurate data on the availability of our services is the AWS Health Dashboard.”

In a statement, Cloudflare said that while many of its services have suffered intermittent failures, they were recovering. 

“We still expect to see intermittent errors across the impacted services as systems handle retried and caches are filled. We are continuing to investigate this, and we will update this list as we assess the impact on a per-service level,” Cloudflare said.

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