Google App Engine Hit By Service Disruption; Web Traffic Plummets

Google’s App Engine has suffered a major service disruption, with thousands of customers being unable to access the platform-as-a-service.

Techcrunch reports that the service started having problems earlier this morning. As of 0730 Pacific Time, anomalies were being reported about its performance in three of its supported languages – Java, Go and Python, while problems were also showing up with Memcache.

Google later posted the following update about the service disruption on its blog:

“At approximately 7:30am Pacific time this morning, Google began experiencing slow performance and dropped connections from one of the components of App Engine.  The symptoms that service users would experience include slow response and an inability to connect to services.  We currently show that a majority of App Engine users and services are affected.  Google engineering teams are investigating a number of options for restoring service as quickly as possible, and we will provide another update as information changes, or within 60 minutes.”

Google App Engine status page

As well as the Google Apps Engine, Tumblr and Dropbox have also reported problems, indicating that the outage is fairly widespread.

Tumblr tweeted that its network problems were down to an issue it was having with one of its uplink providers, adding that it hoped to resume fill services soon. Meanwhile, The Next Web reported that Dropbox was having issues as well.

Elsewhere, it seems evident that the wider web has also been severely affected by the outages, with a sharp decline in web traffic being shown by the Internet Traffic Report today.