An apparent internet service outage disrupted operations on countless major websites, including Google and Spotify, on Thursday.
Around 2 p.m. EDT, outage monitoring service Downdetector reported widespread service disruptions across popular platforms like Snapchat and YouTube, with many social media users reporting difficulty accessing several sites.
Some notable web services that experienced disruptions included: Spotify, Discord, Google and its related services, Cloudflare, Snapchat, YouTube, OpenAI, Character AI, Fubo, Etsy, Vimeo, UPS, Shopify, Microsoft Azure, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Google Gemini, DoorDash, Calendly, Paramount+, IKEA, Twitch, and Microsoft 365.
A full list of shuttered services can be found on Downdetector.
Cloudflare, an IT service management company that provides hosting services, initially announced on its website Thursday afternoon that a “number of services” were suffering “intermittent failures.”
It subsequently updated that some services were starting to “recover,” noting that they “expect to see intermittent errors across the impacted services as systems handle retried and caches are filled.”
Google Cloud, which offers cloud computing services for hundreds of products, also provided a status update on its website at around 3:40 p.m. EDT Thursday noting that engineers had “identified the root cause” of the issue and “applied appropriate mitigations.”
“We are aware that customers are still experiencing varying degrees of impact on individual Google Cloud products,” the update continued. “All the respective engineering teams are actively engaged and working on service recovery. We do not have an ETA for full service recovery.”
In a statement to CNN, a Cloudflare representative said: “This is a Google Cloud outage.”
“A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly,” they added. Google subsequently noted that it was still investigating the service disruption and redirected CNN to view their public status dashboard for updates.
In a blog post late Thursday night, Cloudflare further noted that the “outage lasted 2 hours and 28 minutes” and was caused by a “failure in the underlying storage infrastructure used by our Workers KV service.” Services from both Cloudflare and Google have since been up and running.
Users on social media reacted to the outage in real time earlier on Thursday, with one user on X asking: “Is this the end of the internet? How is everything down?”
