Google Cloud issues linked to Spotify and Discord outages

cloud binary

March 8 outages at music and podcast streaming service Spotify and messaging platform Discord appear to be linked to issues with Google Cloud.

Discord confirmed the problem was with the Google Cloud component “Traffic Director,” while Spotify is known to be a Google Cloud customer.

“The issue with Traffic Director has been confirmed to be caused by a recent release; the release has been rolled back and customers can now start using Traffic Director,” Google Cloud said in a status report. “We have identified a probable root cause and will be publishing an Incident Report within the next several days.”

Discord said that the Traffic Director is responsible for configuring its load balancing layer. “In its malfunction, it caused our internal load balancing layer to not have a valid configuration, which caused a loss of availability of the API,” the company said.

“Engineering took measures to remediate by moving to [an] alternate proxy configuration that did not use traffic director. It took us a bit to switch to using a different load balancing topology, but we were able to do so to restore service before Traffic Director issues were resolved.”

Last year, The Information reported that Spotify was Google’s third-largest customer with about 460 petabytes of data, following Apple and TikTok.

Source: .datacenterdynamics.com