Google Cloud outage brings down a lot of the internet

A significant portion of the internet experienced disruptions on Thursday, impacting various services including the global cloud platform Cloudflare and widely used applications such as Spotify. The source of these issues appears to be a Google Cloud outage, which the company began investigating at 11:46 a.m. PT. As of now, there is no estimated time for when full service will be restored. "We are currently investigating a service disruption affecting some Google Cloud services," stated Google Cloud spokesperson Devon Smiley in an email to TechCrunch. In parallel, Cloudflare also reported service interruptions, noting the issue on its status page at 11:19 a.m. PT. By 12:12 p.m. PT, Cloudflare indicated that it was beginning to see recovery in its services after further investigation. "This is a Google Cloud outage," confirmed Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park. "A limited number of our services that utilize Google Cloud were impacted, but our core services remained unaffected. We expect the issues to be resolved soon." User reports from platforms like DownDetector highlighted outages for popular applications including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI. Additionally, AI coding platforms such as Cursor and Replit were also reported down due to the Google Cloud issues. A representative from Replit acknowledged the situation, stating, "Google Cloud is experiencing an outage, which has affected our service. We're working closely with them to restore functionality as quickly as possible." Spotify's spokesperson Shira Rimini mentioned that they were monitoring Google Cloud's status page for updates. In contrast, an AWS spokesperson confirmed that their services were operational, and Microsoft Azure had not reported any issues. TechCrunch has reached out to other cloud service providers for comments but had yet to receive a response at the time of this publication. Typically, disruptions of this nature are resolved within a few hours, and it is expected that services will begin to recover shortly as the issue unfolds.