A major outage linked to Google Cloud services caused significant disruptions across several popular online platforms on Thursday, affecting tens of thousands of users globally. Streaming giant Spotify, chat service Discord, and web infrastructure provider Cloudflare were among those impacted, with service issues also reported on Snapchat and the AI platform Character.ai.
According to Downdetector, which tracks service interruptions, the outage peaked with around 46,000 Spotify reports, followed by 14,000 related to Google Cloud, and 11,000 for Discord. The problems began in the afternoon and persisted for several hours before services began recovering later in the day.
Cloudflare confirmed the source of the issue was an external disruption from Google Cloud. “This is a Google Cloud outage,” a Cloudflare spokesperson told CNN. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”
The Cloudflare Workers KV, a data storage service, also went offline during the disruption due to the outage from the third-party provider. On its status page, Cloudflare noted that recovery had started across affected services.
Google initially said it was investigating the incident and later confirmed full restoration. “Following a disruption to a number of Google Cloud services, all products have now been fully restored,” a company spokesperson said Thursday evening.
The outage sheds light on the internet’s increasing reliance on a small number of cloud providers. While Google Cloud is a key global player, it holds 12% of the global cloud market, behind Amazon Web Services at 30% and Microsoft Azure at 21%, according to Synergy Research Group.
This is not the first time a cloud infrastructure failure has rippled across the web. An AWS outage in 2021 affected services ranging from banking apps to home automation. Similarly, a Cloudflare issue in 2020 disrupted access to numerous websites.
In recent weeks, other tech platforms like ChatGPT and X (formerly Twitter) have also reported downtime, signaling the broader challenges facing large-scale digital infrastructure.
Though service has resumed, Thursday’s outage underscores the vulnerability of the internet’s backbone—and the need for greater resilience in global cloud systems.
Source: CNN
Bd-pratidin English/ Jisan
