Google Cloud partially fixes load balancer SNAFU that hit Discord, Spotify, others today

If your favorite site was acting up, this might be why

Updated Google Cloud suffered a brief outage, seemingly bringing down or disrupting a whole bunch of websites relying on its systems.

If you've had trouble accessing Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, Etsy, retailers like Home Depot, and others today, this is likely why: a fault developed in Google Cloud's networking infrastructure, resulting in websites throwing up 404 errors. Netizens found themselves unable to log into or use certain services properly.

The good news is that, by now, the IT breakdown has been resolved in that sites using Google's cloud-based load balancers should work again.

The bad news is that Google's customers can't update their load balancing configurations until the web giant gives the word, and when that will be isn't known.

The outage was acknowledged by Google at 1010 PST (1810 UTC), about 35 minutes minutes after websites apparently started going wrong, and a fix was deployed within a few minutes to stop the "page not found" errors. Since that update, though, changes by customers to their external proxy load balancers are being ignored.

According to the tech titan's status page:

Summary: Global: Experiencing Issue with Cloud networking

Description: We believe the issue with Cloud Networking is partially resolved.

Customers will be unable to apply changes to their load balancers until the issue is fully resolved.

We do not have an ETA for full resolution at this point.

We will provide an update by Tuesday, 2021-11-16 12:28 US/Pacific with current details.

Diagnosis: Customers impacted by the issue may have encountered 404 errors when accessing web pages served by the Google External Proxy Load Balancer between 09:35 and 10:10 US/Pacific.

Customer impact from 10:10 US/Pacific onward is configuration changes to External Proxy Load Balancers not taking effect.

Workaround: None at this time.

The load-balancing blunder had a knock-on effect of temporarily disrupting Google Cloud's App Engine, Cloud Functions, Apigee, and Cloud Run services.

We'll let you know when Google considers this situation fully restored. ®

Updated to add

"The issue with Cloud Networking has been resolved for all affected projects as of Tuesday, 2021-11-16 11:28 US/Pacific," Google said on its status page, noting the issue has been fully fixed.

"Customer impact from 10:10 to 11:28 US/Pacific was configuration changes to External Proxy Load Balancers not taking effect. As of 11:28 US/Pacific configuration pushes resumed."