A significant portion of the internet experienced outages on Thursday, with various services affected, including the global cloud platform Cloudflare and popular applications like Spotify. It seems that a Google Cloud outage is the root cause of these disruptions.
Google Cloud initiated an investigation into service issues impacting its customers at 11:46 a.m. PT. By 2:23 p.m. PT, the company had implemented measures to mitigate the issue and expected to restore its services within the hour.
According to Google Cloud spokesperson Devon Smiley, in an email to TechCrunch, “We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services.”
At 11:19 a.m. PT, Cloudflare also reported that it was investigating service disruptions affecting its customers, as stated on its status page. By 12:12 p.m. PT, Cloudflare indicated that its services were starting to recover after investigating the issue.
Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park stated in an email to TechCrunch, “This is a Google Cloud outage. A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We anticipate that they will be back online shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not affected.”
Thousands of users reported outages on popular apps, including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI, according to the crowdsourced reporting platform DownDetector. Additionally, AI coding apps such as Cursor and Replit appeared to experience outages on Thursday.
Spotify spokesperson Shira Rimini stated that they are monitoring Google Cloud’s status page for further updates.
An AWS spokesperson informed TechCrunch that they were not experiencing any service disruptions on Thursday. Microsoft Azure has also not reported any outages on their official channels.
TechCrunch has reached out to other cloud providers and companies mentioned for additional comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Typically, service disruptions of this nature are resolved within a few hours. These outages started around 11 a.m. PT on Thursday, disrupting the workday for millions of people across the U.S. It is likely that services will start coming back online shortly.
