Google Cloud issues take down YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail and more – CNET

Having trouble with YouTube or Gmail? A apparent Google Cloud outage could be why.

Google Cloud has been experiencing widespread problems Sunday, taking YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, Discord and a host of other popular apps and services down across the eastern United States.

Google pointed to "high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube."

"Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors," the company said in a statement around 2 p.m. PT. "We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to return to normal service shortly."

Google's status page for Cloud confirmed the company was having issues with the service as of 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT. The search giant marked Google's Cloud Compute Engine and Cloud Networking services as suffering outages on its status dashboard.

YouTube seemed to be working on the West Coast, with CNET reporters able to access the video streaming site just fine. A CNET editor on the East Coast, however, noted that he was encountering issues. One video, for example, was inaccessible for about 15 minutes.

Google Cloud is the company's hosting platform, similar to Amazon's Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure. In addition to powering its own services, other companies such as Snapchat and Uber, rely on Google's infrastructure to provide the backend for their apps and platforms.

News of the outage quickly spread across social media, with #YouTubeDOWN and #snapchatdown rising to the top of Twitter's Trending Topics section as users voiced their frustrations.

Other services that rely on Google Cloud for hosting, such as Uber, Rocket League, and Discord, also seemed to be experiencing issues as a result of the apparent outage.