Today I had a lot of iCloud Drive connectivity issues on my Mac, but Apple’s system status page showed no service issues. Eventually I discovered that Little Snitch was blocking a cloudd connection to gcs-eu-00002.content-storage-download.googleapis.com…
(I block googleapis.com where possible)
Does Apple uses Google servers for iCloud?
Yes, iCloud storage is supposedly Google Cloud’s biggest customer.
Yes, and in addition to Google Cloud, Apple reportedly uses a mix of AWS, Microsoft Cloud, and increasingly their own cloud servers.
As for this issue, it has been reported previously (a long time ago, though, but I don’t think much has changed here probably):
+1
I seem to recall that Apple started buying storage from AWS and Microsoft, and later dropped MS for Google.
As @cornchip mentioned Apple is Google’s largest commercial customer, and is known internally at Google as Bigfoot. In 2021 it was reported that Apple had 8 million TB of data stored in Google Cloud.
I suspect cost is the main reason Apple has never/may never given iPhone users more than 5GB of free storage.
I can confirm also that I read that Google Cloud is the main storage provider now for iCloud (replacing Azure), the second is AWS.
Wonder what servers dropbox uses? AWS?
It looks like Dropbox uses their own servers located in multiple third-party data centers.