Large parts of the internet experienced significant outages on Thursday, impacting various services ranging from the global cloud platform Cloudflare to popular apps like Spotify. Initial reports indicate that a Google Cloud outage is at the core of these widespread service disruptions.
Google Cloud Investigates and Responds to Service Issues
Google Cloud began investigating the problem affecting its customers at 11:46 a.m. PT. By 2:23 p.m. PT, the company announced that it had implemented mitigation measures and expected to restore full service within the hour.
A Google Cloud spokesperson stated, “We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services.”
At 11:19 a.m. PT, Cloudflare acknowledged disruptions impacting its customers. Around 12:12 p.m. PT, it reported signs of recovery after investigating the issue. Cloudflare confirmed the root cause was a Google Cloud outage affecting a limited number of its services that rely on Google Cloud, though its core services remained unaffected.
Popular Apps Report Outages
Thousands of users reported outages on widely used platforms such as Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI during Thursday afternoon, according to crowdsourced platform DownDetector. AI coding applications like Cursor and Replit also faced disruptions.
Spotify’s spokesperson noted they were monitoring Google Cloud’s status for further updates.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure reported no disruptions during the outage period.
Service disruptions like these are typically resolved within a few hours. The outage started around 11 a.m. PT, affecting millions across the U.S. during peak work hours. Recovery of impacted services is expected shortly.
What The Author Thinks
This outage highlights how heavily the modern internet relies on a small number of cloud providers, making vast swaths of online services vulnerable to a single point of failure. As dependency grows, businesses and consumers alike should push for greater diversification and redundancy in cloud infrastructure to mitigate the risks of similar disruptions in the future.
