Google Cloud is down, people cannot turn on their AC or use their “smart” locks to get access into their homes
Nickie Louise
Posted On June 2, 2019
Google Cloud is currently down. Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services for developers, offering Infrastructure as a service, Platform as a service and Serverless Computing features. The outage is affecting a lot of Google Cloud-based applications and services. Affected users took to social media to express their discontent.
The outage issue was first reported by users on the East Coast users in the U.S. However, website DownDetector shows that the outage is widespread and not limited to East Coast alone. A user on YCombinator News said this: “Can’t use my Nest lock to let guests into my house. I’m pretty sure their infrastructure is hosted in Google Cloud. So yeah… definitely some stuff lost.”
According to Google Cloud Status Dashboard, the incident began at 2019-06-02 12:25 and ended at 2019-06-02 16:45 (US/Pacific times). The outage knocks out Gmail, Discord and Snapchat. Google first reported the at 12:25 PM saying: “We are investigating an issue with Google Compute Engine. We will provide more information by Sunday, 2019-06-02 12:45 US/Pacific.”
The outage shows the danger of the danger Internet-connected service running on third-party servers as this user noted: “You have my honest sympathy because of the difficulties you now suffer through, but it bears emphasizing: this is what you get when you replace what should be a physical product under your control with Internet-connected service running on third-party servers. IoT as seen on the consumer market is a Bad Idea.”
So we finally get AC, right? Great.
Google is down. We have a Nest thermostat. Nest runs on Google. Can’t turn on AC because app is down.
Neat.
— jDantastic (@jDantastic) June 2, 2019
Update 6/2 8:15 PM ET: Google reported that “The network congestion issue in eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00pm US/Pacific.” Google added: “We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence. We will provide a detailed report of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. This detailed report will contain information regarding SLA credits.”
