Google Cloud Outage Raises Stadia Doubts

Google has suffered another major global disruption of its Google Cloud Platform, its third incident in four months, which caused outages in Gmail, YouTube, Snapchat, and Nest.

The incident is opening up questions whether the search giant is ready to launch its upcoming gaming streaming service, Stadia.

Google reported an outage with its Cloud Platform that made several sites and apps inoperable including Gmail, G Suite and YouTube as well as third-party apps which rely on Google’s infrastructure like Discord and Snapchat

Outages were predominantly reported in the US and Europe, with some noting issues here in Australia.

Google Outage Dashboard

Google says it was “related to a larger network issue” related to “high levels of network congestion” in the eastern US.

While these kinds of outages rarely last long, Google’s Cloud services appear to be more unreliable.

Cloud gaming involves streaming a game via a remote server instead of a console and is currently already in use by certain platforms.

Unlike music or movie streaming like Netflix, cloud gaming involves the gamer sending commands/inputs to the server while receiving both video and audio simultaneously — requiring a robust cloud infrastructure and a good internet connection to support the system.

Google has boasted that its cloud gaming service will allow gamers to stream in 4K at 60 fps and its custom controller will feature a button to share gameplay to YouTube.

With Sony and Microsoft teaming up with cloud infrastructure and gaming, and Amazon rumoured to be working on its own cloud-based gaming platform, it appears Google may be losing the faith of its potential Stadia subscribers before it even launches.

Details on the upcoming platform are expected to be shared soon.