The Internet’s massive swath went down on Thursday, impacting a range of services, from global cloud platform CloudFlare to popular apps such as Spotify. The Google Cloud outage appears to be at the root of the confusion in these other services.
Google Cloud said it began investigating a service issue affecting customers at 11:46am. At 2:23 P..M PT, the company said it had implemented mitigation and hopes to regain and execute the service within an hour.
“We are currently investigating the disruptions to Google Cloud services,” Google Cloud spokesman Devon Smimey said in an email to TechCrunch.
At 11:19am, CloudFlare said it was investigating the disruptions in the service affecting customers, according to its status page. At 12:12pm, CloudFlare said the service was beginning to recover after investigating the issue.
“This is a stoppage of Google Cloud,” CloudFlare spokesman Ripley Park said in an email to TechCrunch. “A limited number of CloudFlare services used Google Cloud and were affected. We expect to return soon. The CoreCloudFlare service was not affected.”
Thousands of users have reported that popular apps, including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat and Character.ai, went down Thursday afternoon, according to the downdetector of the crowdsourcing reporting platform. AI coding apps like Cursor and Replit also appeared to be down on Thursday.
Spotify spokesperson Shira Rimini said he is paying attention to the Google Cloud status page for updates.
An AWS spokesman told TechCrunch on Thursday that it had not experienced any disruptions in the service, and Microsoft Azure has not reported an outage of official channels.
TechCrunch has reached out to other cloud providers and companies that mentioned additional comments, but has not received a response at the time of publication.
Typically, service interruptions of this nature are resolved in a few hours. Those suspensions appear to have started around 11am on Thursday, disrupting the middle of working days for millions of people across the United States.