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YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail connection issues in eastern US now fixed

A host of other popular apps and services had been giving users trouble on the East Coast.

Eli Blumenthal Senior Editor
Eli Blumenthal is a senior editor at CNET with a particular focus on covering the latest in the ever-changing worlds of telecom, streaming and sports. He previously worked as a technology reporter at USA Today.
Expertise 5G, mobile networks, wireless carriers, phones, tablets, streaming devices, streaming platforms, mobile and console gaming,
Eli Blumenthal
2 min read
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You can see it's mostly East Coasters who are having YouTube problems.

Downdetector/Screenshot by CNET

If you had troubles with  YouTube or Gmail  on Sunday, those issues should now be fixed.

Google Cloud had been experiencing widespread problems Sunday, which wreaked havoc on YouTube,  Snapchat , Gmail, Discord and a host of other popular apps and services across the eastern United States.

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YouTube wasn't completely down for CNET's John Falcone in Brooklyn Sunday, but some videos were inaccessible, at least temporarily.

Screenshot by CNET

Google pointed to "high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube."

"Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors," the company said in a statement around 2 p.m. PT. "We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to return to normal service shortly."

Google's status page for Cloud confirmed the company was having issues with the service as of 1 p.m. PT. The search giant marked Google's Cloud Compute Engine and Cloud Networking services as suffering outages on its status dashboard.

At about 4 p.m. PT, the status page said the network congestion issue "is resolved for the vast majority of users, and we expect a full resolution in the near future."

As of 5 p.m. PT, the Google Cloud Status Dashboard shows all services available.

"The network congestion issue in eastern USA affecting Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of 4:00pm US/Pacific," a Google spokesperson said late Sunday.

"We will conduct a post mortem and make appropriate improvements to our systems to prevent this from happening again."

YouTube seemed to be working on the West Coast, with CNET reporters able to access the video streaming site just fine. A CNET editor on the East Coast, however, noted that he was encountering issues. One video, for example, was inaccessible for about 15 minutes.

Google Cloud is the company's hosting platform, similar to Amazon's Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure. In addition to powering its own services, other companies such as Snapchat and Uber, rely on Google's infrastructure to provide the backend for their apps and platforms.

News of the outage quickly spread across social media, with #YouTubeDOWN and #snapchatdown rising to the top of Twitter's Trending Topics section as users voiced their frustrations.

Other services that rely on Google Cloud for hosting also seemed to have experienced issues.

Downdetector.com, which monitors network issues, showed widespread issues for the East Coast of the US as well as in parts of Europe for YouTube and Gmail.

Originally published at 1:20 p.m. PT.
Updates, 2:25 p.m.: Adds comment from Google and background on Google Cloud; 4:30 p.m.: Adds that the congestion issue is resolved for most users; 5:50 p.m.: Adds comment from Google spokesperson.

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