Google Cloud outage leads to global internet disruptions

A Google Cloud outage caused disruptions across the globe Thursday afternoon, affecting Google users and other companies like Spotify, Discord, Amazon Web Services and CloudFlare.

Tens of thousands of users reported the issues on Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages and their timelines. The majority of disruption came just before 3 p.m. EST, and various platforms reported that their service had returned before 5 p.m.

The cloud platform hosts a range of services from computing, storage, data analytics, apps and other business services like Gmail and Google Drive to more than one million global companies. It ranks third among competitors Amazon and Microsoft for cloud providers, and provides computing services to about 12% of online companies.

“Most of the Google Cloud products have confirmed full service recovery,” Google Cloud Service Health reported just before 5:30 p.m. “A few services are still seeing some residual impact and the respective engineering teams are actively working on recovery of those services.

Users may keep their eye on Google’s service health dashboard for latest updates, the company said to CNN in a statement.