Internet outages show signs of recovery as Spotify, Google and other popular online services are down for thousands of users
Multiple popular online services were hit by outages on Thursday afternoon, including Spotify, Discord, Google and Amazon Web Services, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions across the web.
The disruptions came as service provider Cloudfare and Google Cloud experienced service disruptions. A Cloudfare 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 Cloudfare 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.'
Google said it was 'investigating a service disruption' when asked for comment.
'We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services,' a representative said. 'Please view our public status dashboard for the latest updates.'
Cloudfare said it was starting to see services recover in a note on its services status page on Thursday afternoon. A Spotify representative pointed CNN to Google's Cloud services dashboard when asked about technical issues impacting the streaming service.
Issue reports on Downdetector for Discord and Google Cloud also began to drop around that time. At its peak, the disruptions impacted roughly 46,000 Spotify users, 11,000 Discord users and 14,000 Google Cloud users, according to Downdetector. Services such as Snapchat and the AI platform Character.ai were also affected, according to the outage tracker website.
Google Cloud plays a massive role in powering the web. In 2018, the company said it 'delivers 25% of worldwide internet traffic.'
It's also not the first time an outage like this has caused widespread interruptions in web service. An Amazon Web Services outage in 2021 disrupted everything from food orders to smart home devices, as CNBC reported at the time.
Several other high-profile services have seen outages in recent weeks, including ChatGPT and social media platform X.
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