Google Cloud Outage Disrupts Spotify, Snapchat, Discord

A major Google Cloud outage on Thursday caused significant disruptions across a wide range of internet services, temporarily affecting the accessibility and functionality of several popular platforms including Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, Cloudflare, and others. The outage, which began around midday U.S. time, impacted not only Google’s suite of productivity tools but also the infrastructure of multiple third-party applications that rely heavily on Google Cloud’s backend systems.

The disruption began at approximately 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time, when users started experiencing difficulties accessing various services. Downdetector, a platform that aggregates user-submitted outage reports, registered tens of thousands of complaints during the peak of the incident. In the United States alone, there were over 14,000 reports of Google Cloud service outages by 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time. Spotify, one of the most widely used music streaming platforms globally, saw approximately 46,000 outage reports during the same period. Discord, a voice, video, and text communication service, experienced nearly 11,000 reports.

These issues were not limited to isolated users. They affected entire platforms and services, some of which rely on Google Cloud infrastructure for key backend operations. Cloudflare, a major content delivery and web infrastructure provider, also reported disruptions around 11:19 a.m. Pacific Time. While its core services were not impaired, a limited number of its functionalities, which depend on Google Cloud, were impacted. Other platforms and services affected included Character.AI, a popular AI interaction tool, as well as AI development platforms like Replit and Cursor.

Despite the broad nature of the disruptions, other major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure reported no issues during the incident. AWS confirmed that its services were functioning normally throughout the day, and no outages were reported on Azure’s official communication channels.

As Google Cloud engineers worked to address the disruptions, mitigation efforts were initiated by early afternoon. By 2:23 p.m. Pacific Time, Google reported that it had implemented fixes and was expecting full recovery of affected services within the hour. While most of the affected platforms began returning to normal operation by late afternoon—Spotify, Discord, and Snapchat were largely accessible again by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time—some Google Cloud services continued to face lingering issues into the evening.

As of 7:13 p.m. Eastern Time, Google acknowledged that several of its cloud components were still experiencing residual impacts. These included services such as Google Cloud Dataflow, Vertex AI Online Prediction, and Personalized Service Health. No official timeline was provided for full resolution of these remaining disruptions.

Within Google’s own suite of services, several critical tools were temporarily unavailable to users. These included Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, and Google Voice. By Thursday evening, the company stated that all core services had been restored for the majority of users, although its engineering team continued to monitor and resolve residual impacts.

While Google’s public service dashboards and status updates helped to convey the progress of resolution efforts, third-party monitoring tools like Downdetector played a critical role in highlighting the extent and nature of user-reported outages in real time. However, given that Downdetector relies on crowdsourced data, the actual number of affected users may have been significantly higher than the figures reported.

The widespread nature of the outage underscores the growing dependence of consumer-facing applications and critical web infrastructure on centralized cloud providers like Google. Services that utilize managed hosting, data analytics, AI-powered operations, and real-time communications were among the hardest hit. The incident also highlights the ripple effect a single cloud provider’s disruption can have on the broader internet ecosystem.

Such outages are not uncommon in the modern digital landscape, but the scale and immediacy of the impact serve as a reminder of the vulnerabilities inherent in centralized cloud-based systems. With many major applications outsourcing core infrastructure to third-party providers, a failure in one system can cascade across dozens of unrelated services, affecting millions of users globally within minutes.

Google has announced that it will conduct an internal investigation to determine the root cause of the outage and will release a detailed incident report in due course. As cloud computing continues to underpin a significant portion of digital life, transparency and resilience from service providers will remain critical to maintaining trust and ensuring continuity.

Until all residual issues are fully addressed and the post-mortem analysis is published, the exact cause and full scope of the disruption remain partially unclear. However, the rapid response and ongoing restoration efforts suggest that most services have either fully recovered or are on track to resume normal operations shortly.