Several major platforms including Google Cloud, Cloudflare and Spotify appeared to experience technical issues or outages Thursday, with outage reports on Downdetector.com spiking throughout the afternoon and internet company Cloudflare reporting broad service outages.
Key Facts
Cloudflare, which serves tens of millions of web requests per second, said in an update at 2:46 p.m. EDT it is seeing “a number of services suffer intermittent failures” that are under investigation, though it noted at 3:12 p.m. EDT it was “starting to see services recover,” with “intermittent errors” still expected.
Cloudflare told Forbes in an email the issues experienced Thursday were the result of a Google Cloud outage, noting a “limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted” and that the company expects a fix shortly.
Google Cloud also reported problems with many of its cloud products across the globe, saying at 3:41 p.m. EDT its engineers identified the root cause and that customers were still encountering issues (Google did not provide an estimated recovery time in the update and confirmed in an email to Forbes it is investigating disruptions to some services).
Outage reports of Amazon Web Services made on Downdetector reached nearly 6,000 at 2:49 p.m. EDT but 1,400 by 3:53 p.m., though the cloud computing platform reported no recent issues on its status page.
Amazon contacted Forbes saying reports that AWS is down “are inaccurate,” and that AWS services are “operating normally,” but did not offer an explanation for the widespread complaints.
Other websites and platforms with spikes in reported issues included Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, YouTube, Gmail, Google Meet and Etsy, with outage reports largely decreasing by 3:55 p.m. EDT.
Social media platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram appeared to be largely spared by the outages, with just a few hundred outage reports cumulatively being made on Downdetector.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.