A widespread Google Cloud outage briefly brought down a number of services around the world.

Google said that a networking issue was to blame for the downtime, which took out Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, Etsy, video games Rocket League, Pokémon Go, and Apex Legends, among others.

Update:

Google said in a statement: "Google Cloud Networking experienced issues with Google Cloud Load Balancing (GCLB) service resulting in impact to several downstream Google Cloud services. Impacted customers observed Google 404 errors on their websites. From preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was a latent bug in a network configuration service which was triggered during a leader election change."

The outage has been root caused and the mitigation fully deployed, with two forms of safeguards protecting against the issue happening in the future.

Original story: "We are experiencing an issue with Cloud Networking beginning at Tuesday, 2021-11-16 09:53 US/Pacific," Google said in a status update.

The issues are listed as ongoing on the company's status page, but services have mostly resumed for affected websites.

Last week, several Google services including Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and Chat were down for an hour, but its Cloud customers were not affected.

Google has experienced multiple outages in the past few years, including two large incidents in March 2020, another in April, and yet another in August.

Then there was the time cows risked causing Google outages, but the problem was solved before major disaster.