Major Internet Outage Hits Google, Spotify, Snapchat, And More Due To Google Cloud Issues

A widespread internet outage on Thursday disrupted several major platforms, including Google, Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, and more. The issue was traced to a technical glitch in Google Cloud, which supports many online services and apps. Google's own services like Gmail, Search, Maps, and Nest were also affected. Third-party apps relying on Google infrastructure, such as Character.ai and the Pokemon Trading Card Game, also experienced downtime.

As of 12:41 PM PT and again at 1:16 PM PT, Google updated its Cloud status page, stating that engineers had identified the root cause and taken steps to mitigate the issue. However, some regions continued to experience slower response times. "Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1," the company confirmed.

The last message on this Cloud status page reads, "As of 18:18 PDT, Vertex AI Online Prediction has fully recovered from the service issue. All affected services are now operating normally. Google has stated that a detailed analysis of the incident will be published after the internal investigation is completed. The team also thanked users for their patience during the disruption."

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."

Photo Credit: Downdetector

According to Downdetector, over 11,00 users reported issues with Google Cloud in India and over 10000 in the US. Downdetector collects outage data by analyzing user-submitted reports from various sources. However, the actual number of affected users may be higher or lower than reported.