Large swaths of the internet went down on Thursday, affecting a range of services, from global cloud platform Cloudflare to popular apps like Spotify. It appears that a Google Cloud outage is at the root of these other service disruptions.
Google Cloud said it started investigating service issues affecting its customers at 11:46 a.m. PT. As of 2:23 p..m PT, the company said it had implemented mitigations, and expects to have its services back up and running within the hour.
“We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services,” said Google Cloud spokesperson Devon Smiley in an email to TechCrunch.
At 11:19 a.m. PT, Cloudflare also said it was investigating service disruptions affecting its customers, according to its status page. At 12:12 p.m. PT, Cloudflare said it was starting to see its services recover after investigating the issue.
“This is a Google Cloud outage,” said Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park in an email to TechCrunch. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted.”
Thousands of users have reported that popular apps, including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI, experienced outages on Thursday afternoon, according to the crowdsourced reporting platform DownDetector. AI coding apps such as Cursor and Replit also appeared to go down on Thursday.
If I am not mistaken, this happened last year too. Might not be the same cause but it seems to be happening more and more. I think Microsoft was also having issues because of their reliance on Google for servers. I could be wrong, but that is what I heard.
I don't use any of the apps that were having issues so I was not aware it even happened until late last night when someone I work with texted me about it asking if I heard what happened.
I think some of the issues lingered for a bit but all seems to be sorted now. It doesn't seem like they knew what caused it but got it sorted fairly fast which is good. It is never good that this happens though and yeah Microsoft was down for a while last year and it cost them a boat load of money!
This is the danger of a centralized system. This is why I am always advocating for open source. We can't have most of the internet relying on one corporation. It will be bad for everyone.