Large portions of the internet experienced outages on Thursday, impacting various services ranging from global cloud platform Cloudflare to popular apps like Spotify. The root cause of these disruptions appears to be a Google Cloud outage.
Google Cloud reported that they began investigating service issues affecting their customers at 11:46 a.m. PT. By 2:23 p.m. PT, the company stated that they had implemented mitigations and anticipated having their services restored within the hour.
According to Google Cloud spokesperson Devon Smiley, “We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services.”
Simultaneously, Cloudflare also acknowledged service disruptions affecting its customers around 11:19 a.m. PT. Cloudflare’s status page indicated that they had started to see services recover by 12:12 p.m. PT after investigating the issue.
Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park confirmed, “This is a Google Cloud outage. A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted.”
Numerous users reported outages on popular apps such as Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI on Thursday afternoon, as per the crowdsourced reporting platform DownDetector. Additionally, AI coding apps like Cursor and Replit were also affected.
Spotify spokesperson Shira Rimini mentioned that they were monitoring Google Cloud’s status page for updates.
While AWS stated that they did not experience any service disruptions on Thursday, Microsoft Azure did not report any outages on their official channels.
JS reached out to other cloud providers and companies for further comments, but responses were not received at the time of publication.
Typically, service disruptions of this nature are resolved within a few hours. The outages began around 11 a.m. PT on Thursday, disrupting the workday for many across the U.S. It is expected that services will start coming back online soon.
