TOPLINE
Users began reporting outages for over a dozen major websites and apps, including Snapchat, Spotify and Google, around 1 p.m. EST Tuesday, according to outage tracker Downdetector, though multiple companies have since confirmed their issues have been fixed.
KEY FACTS
Google Cloud said in a tweet it was experiencing interruptions on some of its services including Google Cloud Networking, Google Cloud console and the Google App engine.
Snapchat acknowledged users were having trouble accessing the app and said it was working on fixing the issue and recommended people stay logged in.
Spotify told Reuters over 50,000 users were reporting issues, and said on Twitter it was checking them out.
As of about 2:30 p.m. EST, Snapchat and Spotify said the issues have been cleared, and asked the public to contact them if they were still having any problems.
Forbes has reached out to the companies to find out more information on the outage.
BIG NUMBER
47. That’s approximately how many websites and apps were reported by users to be down at around 1 p.m. EST, according to Downdetector, and included Target, Paramount Plus, Etsy, Pokemon Go, Discord and Lowe’s.
KEY BACKGROUND
This outage comes one month after Facebook, now called Meta, faced an over five-hour-long outage on some of its major social media platforms including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, which the company noted as one of the worst outages in the company’s history. Meta was estimated to have lost over $100 million from that outage and a second shorter one later that week. Meta said it issued a command while performing maintenance that “unintentionally” took down connections in the backbone of its network, and when they tried to cancel the command, were unable to do so. It said engineers had to be sent out physically to data centers to reboot the systems. Snapchat also experienced an outage last month, with users reporting being unable to send or receive messages, that lasted more than three hours.
FURTHER READING
Facebook Lost More Than $100 Million Through Two Outages This Week (Forbes)