UPDATE What Was Google Up To?

UPDATE About a week ago, the internet had a conniption. In broad patches around the globe, YouTube sputtered. Shopify stores shut down. Snapchat blinked out. And millions of people couldn’t access their Gmail accounts.
The disruptions all stemmed from Google Cloud, which suffered a prolonged outage—which also prevented Google engineers from pushing a fix. And so, for an entire afternoon and into the night, the internet was stuck in a crippling ouroboros: Google couldn’t fix its cloud, because Google’s cloud was broken.  [https://youtu.be/fQdi6NquFXg]

Was Google up to Something [Mostly Nefarious]

MASSIVE OUTAGES: Google Outage Takes Down YouTube, Gmail, Vimeo, Snapchat and More in Parts of US. YWN

Google is saying users of YouTube and other services are were seeing errors or slow performance due to high levels of network congestions in the eastern United States. Gmail, YouTube and other services that rely on Google’s technology were disrupted for several hours on Sunday by what the company said were “high levels of network congestion.”

YouTube, Google Cloud and G Suite services are  were affected, but Google said it believes it has identified the cause of the congestion and expects to return to normal service shortly. The company first identified the issue on its Google Cloud status dashboard at 3:25 p.m. Eastern time.

“The sound of millions of cat videos being suddenly silenced reverberated across the internet” Probably the number 1 most visited sites!

WAS IT GOOGLE OR THE DOJ?

Trump Declares War On Silicon Valley: DoJ Launches Google Anti-Monopoly Probe

Once shielded by the logic of Silicon Valley's relentless churn of innovation - which dictated that no reigning tech empire could rule for long before going the way of Yahoo and AOL - tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google have been subjected to intensifying anti-trust pressure […] Indeed, big tech trust-busting has become one of the few issues in contemporary Washington that garners genuine bipartisan support.

Since the Trump administration swept into power two years ago in spite of thinly veiled opposition from Silicon Valley - as it was later revealed, big tech effectively conspired with the Clinton campaign to hurt Trump's chances - the drumbeat of unprecedented anti-trust scrutiny has grown steadily louder, facilitated by the president's own publicly-voiced suspicions.

And on Friday, the levee finally broke. [was this what caused Google to go down?]

Just before midnight on Friday, at the close of what was a hectic month for markets, WSJ dropped a bombshell of a story: The paper reported that the DoJ has opened an anti-trust investigation of Alphabet Inc., which could "present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter." The report was sourced to "people familiar with the matter," but was swiftly corroborated by the New York Times, Bloomberg and others.

You can read all about it at Zerohedge