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Trouble accessing your favorite site? A bunch of internet platforms, including Google, were experiencing issues

Trouble accessing your favorite site? A bunch of internet platforms, including Google, were experiencing issues

If you had trouble accessing your Google Meet link or your firewall service, you are not alone.
Multiple major sites, especially cloud platforms, experienced a mass outage on Thursday.
Based on information on the Google Cloud Service Health page, a wide array of cloud services are down across multiple continents, from the Americas to Africa. As of 2 p.m. PT, active outages in the US included the agent assist function, speech-to-text, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Workstations, and Google BigQuery.
At around 11:30 a.m. PT, Downdetector showed over 13,000 reported incidents for Google Cloud.
Soon after, web services that appeared to experience disruptions included Amazon Twitch, Replit, CoreWeave's Weights and Biases, Elastic, GitLab, LangChain, Microsoft's GitHub, and Intuit's Mailchimp, according to Downdetector.
"Google cloud is having an outage and that's taking Replit down," said Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit on X. "We're working with them to bring it back up ASAP."
Cloudflare, a major San Francisco-based company that provides content delivery network services and cybersecurity, also posted on its website that some of its services went down "due to an outage of a 3rd party service that is a key dependency."
A spokesperson of Cloudflare confirmed that the interruptions were due to a Google Cloud outage.
A number of apps are also affected. According to Downdetector, users reported issues with Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI on Thursday afternoon.
It is unclear whether all interruptions beyond Google are caused by their reliance on Google Cloud products. As of 3 p.m. PT, Downdetector was still receiving user reports for apps like Spotify. It is unclear how many apps have fully recovered.
A Google spokesperson told BI that the company is still "investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services."
Google also wrote in its latest service health page update at 2:23 p.m. PT that "a few services are still seeing some residual impact and the respective engineering teams are actively working on recovery of those services."
"We expect the recovery to complete in less than an hour," Google added.
Google shares saw a 1% dip as of market closing time on Thursday but mostly recovered in after-hours trading. Cloudflare suffered heavier losses, at almost 5% down by 1 p.m. PT.

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