The current lockdown situation is a test for many people’s nerves, but also for online services and social networks. After Apple News showed a Feed Unavailable error in the Today tab a few days ago, now Snapchat is also experiencing problems.

According to a report by Variety, the issue occurred on April 8 at 10:35 a.m. ET with more than 90 000 users affected in the US. A quick glimpse at DownDetector.com shows a significant spike in user reports around that time yesterday. 80% of the users were unable to send Snaps, and 18% reported issues on the receiving end. The outage lasted for about 3 hours, and the most affected regions were the East Coast of the US, Western Europe, and some parts of Australia.

A spokesperson for Snap said in an email at 3:15 p.m. ET that all the problems had now been resolved. Apparently, the Cloud IAM (Identity and Access Management) service in the Google Cloud Platform caused the issues. Snapchat support acknowledged the problem in a tweet without giving any additional information at the time.
 

We’re aware many Snapchatters are having trouble using the app. Hang tight – we’re looking into it ️

— Snapchat Support (@snapchatsupport) April 8, 2020

 
Many online services saw spikes in traffic in the past few weeks. The current coronavirus pandemic is forcing people to work from home to contain the spread of the disease. While Snapchat is rarely used for work purposes, it is one of the most popular messaging services in the US, with more than 100 million active daily users as of January 2020.