Google oriented web services such as YouTube, Google Photos, Snapchat, Gmail, Nest, Discord, and Vimeo were disrupted for almost 4 hours late Sunday. But on contrary to the ongoing rumors that the services were hit by a cyber attack, the Alphabet Inc, subsidiary has issued a press statement that the downtime was caused by a technical error caused on Google Cloud Platform(GCP) on which the said services were operating.
Cybersecurity services have learned that the issues related to Google Cloud Platform started at 3 PM ET or 12 PM PT and it took 4 hours for the tech giant to resolve the issue.
Shopify which happens to operate its services through GCP is also reported to have experienced an outage where credit card payments of multinational giants such as Nestle were affected.
In October last year, Google service YouTube witnessed a disruption for about an hour and so in countries like Europe, Asia, US, and the Asia Pacific. Although Google remained tight-lipped on the attack, a hacktivists group named ‘The Ghost Squad Hackers’ bragged on Twitter that their tactics made the YouTube servers face a downtime.
So, in the same way, when the services of the internet juggernaut went down today, twitteratis across the globe started to promote fake news that the tech giant was affected by a cyber attack.
Google has clarified in its statement that the issue was caused by large web traffic congestion coming from East Coast of the United States and was in no way connected to Distributed denial of service attack launched by US adversaries as specified in a certain section of media.
Note- Ghost Squad Hackers(GSH) has a history of infiltrating into the servers of CNN, Donald Trump Real estate websites, Fox News, Ethiopian government websites on a previous note.
