Google Cloud Outage: Internet Disruption Explained

Widespread Internet Disruptions Reported on Thursday

A significant number of internet services experienced outages on Thursday, impacting a diverse range of platforms. These included the global cloud provider Cloudflare, as well as widely used applications like Spotify.

Initial investigations point to an outage within Google Cloud as the primary cause of these cascading service interruptions.

Google Cloud Addresses the Issue

Google Cloud initiated an investigation into service problems affecting its user base at 11:46 a.m. PT. By 2:23 p.m. PT, the company indicated that mitigation strategies were in place.

Full service restoration is anticipated within the next hour, according to Google Cloud.

“We are presently examining a disruption affecting certain Google Cloud services,” stated Google Cloud spokesperson Devon Smiley in correspondence with TechCrunch.

Cloudflare's Response and Impact

Cloudflare also began investigating service disruptions impacting its customers at 11:19 a.m. PT, as documented on its status page.

Service recovery was observed starting at 12:12 p.m. PT following their investigation.

“The root cause of this issue is a Google Cloud outage,” explained Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park to TechCrunch. “A limited subset of Cloudflare’s services, utilizing Google Cloud, were affected.

We anticipate a swift return to normal operation. Core Cloudflare services remained unaffected.”

Affected Applications and Services

Numerous users reported outages across popular applications, including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI, according to reports submitted to the crowdsourced monitoring platform, DownDetector.

AI-focused coding applications, such as Cursor and Replit, also experienced downtime on Thursday.

Spotify spokesperson Shira Rimini confirmed they were actively monitoring Google Cloud’s status page for further updates.

Other Cloud Providers Remain Operational

An AWS spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that they were not experiencing any service disruptions on Thursday.

Similarly, Microsoft Azure has not reported any outages through its official communication channels.

TechCrunch has contacted additional cloud providers and impacted companies for further comment, but responses were not received by the time of publication.

Expected Resolution and Timeline

Service disruptions of this type are typically resolved within a few hours. These particular outages began around 11 a.m. PT on Thursday.

This timing disrupted the workday for millions of individuals across the United States. It is expected that services will begin to return to functionality in the near future.