Snapchat, YouTube, Gmail suffered from major outage due to issues with Google's cloud server

Apps and web services like Gmail, YouTube and Snapchat among others suffered from major outages in the US due to issues with Google's Cloud server. Google's cloud server not only powers Google's own web services but also other apps apart from Google's. Problems with Google's cloud server briefly made the associated apps, and web services to become inaccessible to some uses. The problem, however, occurred mainly for users in the US. Google then fixed the issue four hours after it occurred. Here's what Google has to say on its Google Cloud status dashboard:

"The network congestion issue in the eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00 pm US/Pacific. 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."

From the statement, it's clear that the network congestion issue mainly affected Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube users in the eastern US. Majority of Snapchat users reported the issues sending and receiving snaps (texts, photos and videos). According to downdetector.com, Snapchat is still down across the US. One Snapchat user reported issues with viewing friends' stories.

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"I can't see the stories. I can see the subscriptions but not the friends' stories."

Meanwhile, Snapchat has acknowledged the problem.

"We're aware of an issue preventing some Snapchatters from using the app. Hang tight!"

Apart from Snapchat, Vimeo and Discord users are also affected since all these use Google Cloud on the backend. Other than Snapchat, Discord and Vimeo, Shopify also experienced payment related problems due to Google's outage. The issue also prevented some online and offline stores processing credit card payments for hours.