If you tried to access Spotify or Discord yesterday, you may have encountered difficulties. You are not the only one to do so – a Google Cloud outage on Thursday impacted numerous prominent online platforms, including Google’s own services, Spotify, Snapchat, and Discord, causing widespread disruption for users globally, before it was resolved. The incident’s root cause was a technical glitch within Google Cloud, the infrastructure that supports a vast array of online apps and services.
This incident follows a separate Google service interruption in March, which affected Google Chromecast users amidst news of the device’s discontinuation in favor of the new Google TV Streamer.
To recap, Google’s core services, including Gmail, Search, Maps, and Nest, experienced downtime. Beyond Google’s direct offerings, third-party applications reliant on its infrastructure, such as Character.ai and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, also faced significant interruptions during the duration. Google addressed the issue, with updates posted on its Cloud status page at 12:41 PM PT and again at 1:16 PM PT. The company confirmed that its engineers had successfully identified the underlying problem and initiated measures to mitigate its impact. While service restoration commenced, some regions continued to report slower response times. “Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1,” Google stated at the time.
By 6:18 PM PT (18:18 PDT), the company reported a full recovery for Vertex AI Online Prediction, confirming that all directly affected services were operating normally. Google revealed that it will later reveal the analysis of the incident once its its internal probe into the matter is completed. The company extended its appreciation to users for their understanding and patience during the disruption.
The disruptions on Thursday were not isolated to Google’s direct services. Cloudflare, a major content delivery network and web security provider, also experienced service interruptions, which its representatives directly attributed to the Google Cloud outage. A Cloudflare representative informed CNN that while a limited number of their services utilizing Google Cloud were impacted, their core operations remained unaffected and were expected to return online swiftly.
Outage tracking website Downdetector.com registered a notable surge in user reports, with over 11,000 incidents reported for Google Cloud in India and over 10,000 in the US. At the peak of the disruption, Downdetector logged nearly 46,000 outage reports for Spotify and nearly 11,000 for Discord in the US. Services such as Google’s Gemini AI, Firebase, Shopify, OpenAI (experiencing issues with single sign-on), Amazon’s Twitch, and Microsoft’s GitHub were among the many platforms impacted as well.
And as is the norm with outages, social media platforms became a hub for users sharing their experiences and frustrations, often with a humorous or sarcastic tone. Numerous posts quipped about the irony of Google Cloud’s status page not immediately reflecting the widespread outages, while others, particularly developers, described encountering unexpected errors in their applications, swiftly linking them to the broader Google Cloud disruption. As of early Friday morning, Downdetector reports for Spotify had fallen to just over 1,000, and Discord reports had dropped to approximately 200, before Google’s Cloud dashboard noted that “All the services are fully recovered from the service issue.”
Content originally published on The Tech Media – Global technology news, latest gadget news and breaking tech news.
