Google Cloud Platform goes down for two hours after connectivity issue

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Google has resolved an issue with Google Compute Engine whereby its platform went down for two hours.

The network issue where instances in ‘multiple zones’ lost connectivity first began at 2259 US Pacific time (0659 GMT), with Google first issuing an update on 2346.

“The problem with network connectivity in Google Compute Engine is resolved as of shortly after 0100 US/Pacific,” a Google status page explained. “We are sorry for any issues this may have caused to you or your users and thank you for your patience and continued support.

“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are constantly working to improve the reliability of our systems,” it added.

Google has traditionally been one of the more reliable public cloud providers. According to CloudHarmony’s metrics for 2014, Compute Engine suffered 66 outages last year for a 99.982% SLA. Google’s Cloud DNS had a 100% record, with Cloud Storage suffering eight outages and App Engine just one outage.

Yet this downtime is particularly ironic given the search giant launched PerfKit earlier in February, an open source cloud benchmarking tool which aims to be a “living benchmark framework, designed to evolve as cloud technology changes.” It was particularly interesting as to how Google would measure up against its opponents.

Earlier this year Google also announced Cloud Monitoring, a service which tracks usage and uptime for Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services customers, as well as Cloud Trace, which allows developers to create reports on their app’s performance by finding traces of slow requests.

Did you suffer any issues with the outage?