Massive cloud outage knocks out internet services across the globe

The question now isn’t what’s wrong with what cloud service, it’s what service isn’t down?

There’s a storm in the air where I’m writing, but it’s nothing like the one roiling the clouds at this time. Across the social networks, there are numerous reports that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Cloudflare, the content delivery network (CDN), are all down. 

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.” 

The answer, unfortunately, is, we don’t know. At 3:30 p.m. ET, we began to get some additional information. 

First, this is not just an American problem. Google Cloud reports it’s a global problem. Google states that Multiple GCP (Google Cloud Platform) products are experiencing impact due to Identity and Access Management Service Issues.

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

Details? When will it be fixed? Stay tuned, folks. Google doesn’t know yet. 

The company said its engineers identified the root cause of the issue, but the problem wasn’t fully resolved, according to a 3:41 p.m. ET update 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.”

The AWS Health Dashboard doesn’t show any trouble on Downdetector; however, users are reporting problems with AWS. Most of these failures appear to be with the US-East regions. (Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of ZDNET.)

In a statement, Cloudflare said that while many of its services have suffered intermittent failures, they are beginning to recover. 

“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.

Hang in there, folks, it’s going to be a while. 

Get the morning’s top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.