Snapchat, Spotify, Discord and other large parts of the internet go down after Google cloud problem

A Google service has gone down – and taken many of the largest parts of the internet down with it.

Snapchat, Spotify, Discord and other major web services ran into problems because of an issue at the web giant.

While Google's own websites and apps appeared to be working, the company also provides a range of service to third-parties. It appeared to be an issue with one of those technical tools that is causing the issues.

As well as chat and social apps like Snapchat and Discord, games appeared to be affected too. Rocket League and Pokemon Go reported problems during the outage, for instance.

In practise, it meant that people are having trouble logging into some of the biggest services on the web.

The problems appeared to be related to the load balancing tools that Google offers on its Cloud Platform. That service is intended to ensure that companies can distribute their work across the world, allowing them to ensure that they can quickly scale up if many users are asking for an amount of work that would usually overwhelm them.

Such technology is integrated into the central workings on many of the world's biggest apps, meaning that the outage had knock-on effects across the internet.

While major outages are usually focused on specific websites – Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram have all had significant issues over the last week, for instance – problems with the technology powering them can have far more distributed effects.

In 2016, for instance, there was a huge cyber attack on a company called Dyn. That hit the domain name server tools that effectively work as a phonebook across the internet, ensuring that people typing web addresses into their phones are directed to the right place and shown the right information.

The issues at that time took down many of the world's biggest websites, such as Reddit, Spotify and Twitter.

Even though large websites will often build the software that shows to users themselves, that software will often rely on important frameworks, hardware and technology that is shared across websites. To do that, they will often pay for services from companies like Google or Amazon Web Services – meaning that any potential outage on those platforms can quickly ripple across the entire internet.

At the time of publication, Google posted an update to its status page saying that it was aware of the issue and that service should soon be restored.