Internet outages show signs of recovery as Spotify, Google and other popular online services are down for thousands of users
By Lisa Eadicicco, CNN
(CNN) — Multiple popular online services were hit by outages on Thursday afternoon, including Spotify, Discord and Google, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions across the web.
Downdetector also reported issues at Amazon Web Services, but the company says it was operating normally on Thursday.
The disruptions came as service provider Cloudflare and Google Cloud experienced service disruptions. A Cloudflare representative told CNN that a Google Cloud outage was behind the issue and that its core services were not impacted.
“This is a Google Cloud outage,” a Cloudflare representative said in an email to CNN. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”
The company also said on its system service dashboard that Cloudflare Workers KV, a data storage service, went offline “due to an outage of a 3rd party service.”
Google said it was “investigating a service disruption” Thursday afternoon, adding later in the day that the issue was resolved.
“Following a disruption to a number of Google Cloud services, all products have now been fully restored,” a Google Cloud spokesperson said in a statement.
Cloudflare said it was starting to see services recover in a note on its services status page on Thursday afternoon. A Spotify representative pointed CNN to Google’s Cloud services dashboard when asked about technical issues impacting the streaming service.
Issue reports on Downdetector for Discord and Google Cloud also began to drop around that time. At its peak, the disruptions impacted roughly 46,000 Spotify users, 11,000 Discord users and 14,000 Google Cloud users, according to Downdetector. Services such as Snapchat and the AI platform Character.ai were also affected, according to the outage tracker website.
Google Cloud plays a massive role in powering the web. In 2018, the company said it “delivers 25% of worldwide internet traffic.” It’s one of the world’s top cloud providers, although it’s not as large as Amazon and Microsoft, according to Synergy Research Group. Google accounts for 12% of the global cloud services market, while Microsoft makes up 21% and Amazon accounts for 30%.
It’s also not the first time an outage like this has caused widespread interruptions in web service. An Amazon Web Services outage in 2021 disrupted everything from food orders to smart home devices, as CNBC reported at the time. A Cloudflare outage also took down a bunch of popular online services in 2020.
Several other high-profile services have seen outages in recent weeks, including ChatGPT and social media platform X.
This story has been updated with additional context and developments.
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