Large swaths of the internet went down on Thursday, affecting a range of services, from global cloud platform Cloudflare to popular apps like Spotify. It appears that a Google Cloud outage is at the root of these other service disruptions.
Google Cloud said it started investigating service issues affecting its customers at 11:46 a.m. PT. As of 2:23 p..m PT, the company said it had implemented mitigations, and expects to have its services back up and running within the hour.
“We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services,” said Google Cloud spokesperson Devon Smiley in an email to TechCrunch.
At 11:19 a.m. PT, Cloudflare also said it was investigating service disruptions affecting its customers, according to its status page. At 12:12 p.m. PT, Cloudflare said it was starting to see its services recover after investigating the issue.
“This is a Google Cloud outage,” said Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park in an email to TechCrunch. “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.”
Thousands of users have reported that popular apps, including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI, experienced outages on Thursday afternoon, according to the crowdsourced reporting platform DownDetector. AI coding apps such as Cursor and Replit also appeared to go down on Thursday.
Spotify spokesperson Shira Rimini said they were keeping an eye on Google Cloud’s status page for more updates.
An AWS spokesperson told TechCrunch they were not experiencing any service disruptions on Thursday, and Microsoft Azure has not reported any outages on their official channels.
TechCrunch has reached out to other cloud providers and companies mentioned for additional comment, but we have not heard back at the time of publication.
Typically, service disruptions of this nature are resolved in a matter of hours. These outages appeared to start around 11 a.m. PT on Thursday, disrupting the middle of the work day for millions of people across the U.S. It seems likely that services will start coming back online relatively shortly.
