Google, OpenAI and Spotify were down on Thursday after a widespread technology outage.
A large number of platforms appear to have been impacted, with tens of thousands of users reporting issues on Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages. Reports started to escalate on Thursday around 2 p.m. EST and peaked around 2:30 p.m. before tapering off for most platforms.
In a statement on its website Thursday afternoon, Cloudflare, which provides services to several major companies impacted by the outage, said that a number of its services were suffering intermittent failures and that it was investigating the matter.
According to a spokesperson for the company, the source of the outage was Google Cloud.
“A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted,” the spokesperson told CBS News on Thursday. “We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted.”
By Thursday evening, Cloudflare services had been restored and were “fully operational,” the spokesperson said.
Issues at Google Cloud
Google Cloud started reporting issues with its Google Cloud Platform products on Thursday at 2:46 p.m. The company had more than 13,000 reports of disruptions on Downdetector.com. By 3:30 p.m., the company said most of its services had been recovered, adding later that it would soon be fully operational.
“We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services,” a spokesperson for Google Cloud told CBS News on Thursday. “Please view our public status dashboard for the latest updates,” they added.
“In the coming days, we will publish a full incident report of the root cause, detailed timeline and robust remediation steps we will be taking,” the company stated on its status webpage on Thursday.
Thousands of users impacted
In a blog post on Friday, Cloudflare apologized for the outage, which impacted all of its customers.
“We’re deeply sorry for this outage: this was a failure on our part, and while the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them,” the company wrote.
Certain platforms appeared to be back up and running by late afternoon on Thursday, including Spotify and OpenAI.
Spotify had the most outages, with 46,000 users of the audio streaming platform reporting issues as of 3 p.m. on Thursday. In a community update early on Friday, a Spotify moderator said the problems “should now be fixed for everyone.”
“All impacted services have been recovered,” OpenAI stated in an update at 4:26 p.m.
Platforms impacted by the technology outage on Thursday according to Downdetector.com include:
DiscordGoogle MeetSnapchatSpotifyGoogleGmailGoogle CloudGoogle NestDoorDashCharacter AIYouTubeBoxEtsyPokémon Trading Card GamePokémon Go
CloudflareMailchimpUPSFuboTVRocket LeagueVerizonVimeoShopify
HighLevelParamount+ (CBS News and Paramount+ are owned by Paramount Global)ClaudeD&D BeyondT-MobileCloverPhasmophobiaEcobeeHighLevelDragon BallProcoreNPMDialpadDaveOpenAIMicrosoft AzureMicrosoft 365DeviantArtFitbitMarvel Contest of ChampionsCursorWixZoomGoogle Gemini SpectrumRobloxAT&TreCAPTCHA