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Google glitch triggers major internet outage

Google's networking went awry and many sites failed. (UPDATED)
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

Another day, another major internet outage. This time around, Google reported that it had experienced a global issue with its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) networking at 12:53 PM US Eastern time. 

The result? Many of us have seen 404 errors when trying to get to some of our favorite web pages, such as Spotify, Facebook, and ZDNet. Indeed, according to DownDectector, there appears to be more major sites having problems than not. 

According to internet managers on the Outages mailing list, the specific problem seems to be with the GCP load balancers. These, working with Google's Cloud Delivery Network (CDN), provide high availability web servers. This is designed to stop website failures and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks by putting your website behind a single anycast IP and then scaling your resources up or down with intelligent autoscaling. 

But, with a global problem, Google was unable to keep the sites up.

While at times your website may come back up, since it's only the load balancers and CDN that's having trouble as this is written, 1:42 PM Eastern, Google is still reporting, "We do not have an ETA for full resolution at this point."

However, by 1:59 PM, Google stated, "The issue with Cloud Run has been resolved for all affected users." Users, however, are still reporting some website outages.

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