Pokemon GO is down with Spotify, Discord, Snapchat via Google Cloud issue

By Chris Burns/Updated: Nov. 17, 2021 3:44 am EST

Today Pokemon GO went down and fans around the world began to see the notification "Unable to authenticate. Please try again." Similar situations appeared when users attempted to sign in or continue using services like Snapchat, Spotify, and Discord. It would appear – at first glance – that the problem rests squarely in the lap of Google Cloud.

Niantic relies on Google Cloud and, as such, it'll be unlikely that we'll see log-in available for Pokemon GO until Google Cloud's own services are fixed. We'll be keeping an eye on the server statuses as such, and will keep you informed! Cross your fingers Niantic takes account of the down time and extends their special event this week beyond its original stop time!

Google Cloud had issues starting at around noon, Central Time, on November 16, 2021. Google Cloud works with and/or serves a wide variety of brands that then had issues as a result. Not all services that currently or have ever used Google Cloud had issues at once, but one peek at the "Leading companies around the world" that use Google Cloud cross-referenced with complaints on DownDetector show what appears to be a tie between the two.

Home Depot, Etsy, Nest, Apex Legends (yes, the game), Target, and other Google-related services saw trouble today. Two primary services hit hardest by this down time were Fitbit and Nest.

Etsy's public status disclosed the following: "Our cloud hosting provider is experiencing an outage that is affecting many of their sites. We are working with them to resolve this as quickly as possible." This sort of thing doesn't happen often with Google Cloud, but it is not entirely unprecedented.

UPDATE: A Google Cloud representative said "CPU and memory utilization metrics are intermittently missing for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This issue does not affect auto-scaling capabilities. Short term mitigation is available." This matches with the current red-light exclamation mark on the "Google Cloud Networking" bit of the Google Cloud server status today, too.