Several high-profile web services experienced major disruptions on Thursday as issues related to Google Cloud affected the internet. Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, and YouTube were among the affected platforms, with outage reports spiking on Downdetector and triggering widespread user complaints.
According to Cloudflare, the problems began around 2:46 p.m. EDT, when a “limited number of services” relying on Google Cloud began suffering intermittent failures. By 3:12 p.m., recovery efforts were underway, though users continued to encounter sporadic errors.
Google Cloud confirmed the incident, noting its engineers had identified the root cause and were working on mitigation. As of publication, a full resolution had not been announced.
Amazon Web Services, which saw nearly 6,000 outage reports filed in a similar time window, said its services remained “fully operational” despite widespread user concerns.
Who Was Impacted?
In addition to Google Cloud and Cloudflare, users reported outages or degraded performance on services such as Spotify, Discord, Gmail, Google Meet, Etsy, and Snapchat.
YouTube users also noted playback interruptions. Downdetector logs show issues began stabilizing after 4 p.m. EDT.
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Notably, major social platforms, including Instagram, X, and Facebook, remained largely unaffected.
This latest incident comes just days after ChatGPT experienced a temporary outage, underscoring a broader trend of service disruptions among major tech platforms. While unrelated, the proximity of these failures is drawing scrutiny over the resilience of cloud-based infrastructure.
The recurring theme is that reliance on a small number of providers creates cascading risks when things go wrong.
As more companies shift toward centralized cloud environments, today’s events highlight the tradeoffs between scalability and system fragility.
Google has not yet issued a full post-mortem, but Cloudflare suggests a fix is imminent.
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