Spotify, Discord, Cloudflare and Google were among the many well-known online sites that experienced outages on Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a website that monitors service interruptions worldwide.
Though Amazon Web Services claims to have been functioning smoothly on Thursday, Downdetector also detected problems. Service interruptions occurred at Google Cloud and Cloudflare, two service providers.
The problem was caused by a Google Cloud outage, and its core services were unaffected. “This is a Google Cloud Outage,” a Cloudflare representative said in an email to CNN. A limited number of services at Cloudflare that use Google Cloud were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”
Cloudflare Workers KV, a data storage service, fell unavailable “due to an outage of a third-party service,” the business also stated on its system service dashboard. When contacted for a response, Google stated that it was “investigating a service disruption.”
“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.”
In a message posted on its service status page Thursday afternoon, Cloudflare stated that it was beginning to observe the recovery of its services.
When questioned about technical problems affecting the streaming service, a Spotify representative directed CNN to Google’s Cloud services dashboard.
Around that time, there were additional reports of problems with Downdetector for Google Cloud and Discord.
According to Downdetector, at this height, the outages affected about 46,000 Spotify customers, 11,000 Discord users, and 14,000 Google Cloud users. The outage tracker website also reported that services including Snapchat and AI platform Character.ai were affected.
A significant portion of the web’s power comes from Google Cloud. The business claimed to “deliver 25% of worldwide internet traffic” in 2018.
Synergy Research Group says it’s one of the best cloud providers in the world, despite not being as big as Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon holds 30% of the worldwide cloud services industry, Microsoft holds 21%, and Google holds 12%.
Additionally, this type of outage has already resulted in extensive disruptions to web services.
As CNBC noted at the time, an Amazon Web Services outage in 2021 caused disruptions to everything from smart home devices to restaurant orders.
In 2020, a Cloudflare outage also brought down a number of well-known internet services. In recent weeks, a number of other well-known services have experienced outages, such as social media platform X and ChatGPT.