Popular private messaging app Snapchat went down worldwide this Tuesday. Users of the app are reporting that the app displays a “could not refresh” error. Neither can its users login, sign up, send or receive snaps. Snapchat has been offline for more than 24 hours now and no time frame has been quoted by the service provider explaining how long it will take to fix the problem.
Details about the Outage
According to downdetector.com, a website which keeps track of most apps’ and websites’ working status, Snapchat went offline yesterday morning but was facing issues for the past week. Snapchat was already aware of the issues before the service went down completely and tweeted this:
https://twitter.com/snapchatsupport/status/674156829551783940
The problem appears to be with a Google service which provides the cloud computing facility to Snapchat and several other companies. In other words, many other companies using the Google Cloud Platform are also suffering from the same problem but Snapchat seems to be the most high-profile service affected by this issue. Snapchat has over 100 million active users every day.
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform provides a set of tools necessary for running apps and websites without having to set up dedicated server centers thus offering a much more economical solution. An update from the Google App Engine’s status notes that the issue began to surface on Tuesday morning.
Google has provided a statement assuring that it is working on a fix for the issue. The search giant is also providing hourly updates on the work done, but it is still unclear how long it will be until the issue is resolved.
Snapchat also tweeted with a few updates confirming that it was aware of the issue and, later on, stated that it was also working to fix the problem. A tweet said:
We are working hard to solve this issue as quickly as possible and are very sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our community and partners.
The team behind Snapchat, however, did not say that the issue was caused by a disruption in Google’s service.
Is this the First Incident of its Kind?
In October 2012, Amazon, Dropbox and Tumblr faced a similar outage. All of these companies relied on Google Cloud Platform. Some major blackouts in recent times include Skype which went down worldwide for the most part of the day a couple of months ago. Facebook was down worldwide earlier this year as well. WhatsApp suffered from some laggy service a few months ago too.
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