In a widespread digital disruption on Thursday, numerous popular online services experienced outages due to persistent problems with Google Cloud. According to monitoring site Downdetector, users of platforms such as Spotify and Discord began to report issues early in the afternoon, with tens of thousands affected globally.
Notably, the outage for Spotify peaked around 3 p.m. Eastern Time, though reports of access restoration soon followed as some users regained their service. Meanwhile, Google’s Cloud status page acknowledged an incident impacting both U.S. and international clients. The tech giant indicated that its engineers had identified the issue and were working on solutions to ease the disruption.
The company stated, “We have identified the root cause and applied appropriate mitigations.” However, Google Cloud did not provide a specific timeline for when full service would be restored.
Google Cloud, an integral part of Alphabet Inc., is known for hosting an extensive array of internet services. It stands as one of the company’s most rapidly expanding segments, despite the fact that the bulk of Alphabet’s revenue still comes from Google’s well-known search engine. Last year, Google Cloud generated $43.2 billion in revenue, marking a 31% increase compared to the previous year, whereas Alphabet’s total revenue saw a 14% increase over the same period.