Massive Internet Outage Hits Spotify, Discord, Google, and More

Many users around the world suddenly found popular online services—including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, Character.AI, and parts of Google—offline for a couple of hours on Thursday. Error messages and disrupted access left millions hanging, with the internet feeling unusually broken.The root cause turned out not to be a mass cyberattack or nation-state hack, but a failure deep within the core infrastructure of the internet. A glitch in Google Cloud triggered a cascading outage that impacted other major services.Google Cloud, which underpins countless websites and applications, experienced an internal problem that disrupted its systems. Since Cloudflare relies heavily on Google Cloud for certain services, it was quickly swept up in the fallout.Cloudflare later clarified that its “Workers KV” storage service—used for configurations, user authentication, and other essential tasks—failed due to dependency issues with its cloud provider. As a result, numerous Cloudflare services stopped working, bringing down many third-party websites and apps.For approximately two and a half hours, vital parts of Cloudflare’s infrastructure didn’t function. This included authentication services, security checks, and its administrative dashboard. The ripple effect reached a far wider set of services that rely on Cloudflare to operate smoothly.Cloudflare acknowledged the problem in a public statement, taking full responsibility for choosing dependencies that ultimately failed. They admitted the outage highlighted weaknesses in their system design and pledged to improve resilience.Google has promised to release a detailed post-mortem once its investigation concludes. The company noted that restoring services took time even after identifying the issue, pointing to the interconnected nature of modern cloud systems.The outage underscored how centralized internet infrastructure has become, with a few major providers like Google Cloud and Cloudflare controlling key parts of the global web. Incident trackers recorded thousands of outage reports, although rival platforms such as AWS reported normal operations at the time.By late Thursday afternoon, engineers from both Google and Cloudflare had successfully restored service. Cloudflare confirmed it is working on reducing reliance on any single provider to prevent similar cascades in the future.