This Massive Outage Took Down Discord, Spotify, Snapchat, and Many Other Services Together

Multiple popular online platforms, including Spotify, Discord, and Google services, suffered significant disruptions starting earlier this week, with outage reports peaking for tens of thousands of users globally. According to Downdetector, the issues stemmed from a Google Cloud outage that rippled across the web, impacting services that rely on its infrastructure.

What Happened?

The outage originated from Google Cloud, one of the world’s largest cloud service providers. A spokesperson later confirmed the issue was resolved by Thursday evening, stating: “Following a disruption to several Google Cloud services, all products have now been fully restored.”

Cloudflare, which uses Google Cloud for some of its services, confirmed the cause, noting that the disruption affected Cloudflare Workers KV, a key-value data storage service. However, they emphasized that Cloudflare’s core systems remained unaffected.

Impact Across Major Platforms

At the peak of the outage:

• Spotify saw reports from over 46,000 users
• Discord was affected for 11,000 users
• Google Cloud reported issues from more than 14,000 users

Other platforms impacted included Snapchat and Character.ai, both of which also rely on cloud-based infrastructures. Spotify directed users to Google’s service dashboard when asked about the problem.

While Amazon Web Services (AWS) was also flagged on Downdetector, the company stated it was operating normally.

Google Cloud, which powers an estimated 25% of global internet traffic, is the third-largest cloud provider behind Amazon (30%) and Microsoft (21%), according to Synergy Research Group.