Much of the internet appears to have broken, with Spotify, Google, Snap and Discord all hit by major issues Thursday.
The problem appears to be related to technical issues at Google Cloud, which provides the infrastructure that powers much of the internet.
Many Google products – such as Search, Gmail, Maps, Meet, Nest and others – were hit by the problems, according to tracking website Down Detector.
But the issues have also affected third-party websites; which may rely on Google’s tools. That includes Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, the Pokémon trading card game and artificial intelligence tool Character.ai.
Etsy, Shopify, UPS, Roblox and others also seemed to be affected by problems. Other web infrastructure platforms such as Cloudflare were also hit by problems, though Cloudflare itself was not affected, a spokesperson said.
The problems appeared widespread, affecting vast numbers of users across the world, according to Down Detector. Google indicated on a tracking page that all of its regions had been hit by the problems.
Issues began around 2pm on the east coast. Shortly after, Google said that it was aware of the problems — but it took hours before it was able to begin a full recovery.
Google Cloud’s status website showed a vast array of issues across the world. Many of the technologies that third-party companies rely on to provide services were broken, it said.
Google apologized to “all who are affected by the disruption”. It did not give any information about what had caused the problems – only that it had “identified the root cause” and had “applied appropriate mitigations”.
At around 4pm eastern, the company said it had found the issue and applied a fix. But it noted that there could still be issues and that it did not know when a full recovery would happen.
People on social media were not happy to find that their favorite platforms were down.
“How spotify gonna be down when i am at the gym what tf am i supposed to do now,” one X user wrote.
Another posted: “Is this the end of the internet? how is everything down… AWS, Google Firebase, Cloudflare.”
“GUYS INTERNET IS COOKED Wtf do i do without discord and spotify im extremely bored, i cant even work google drive is down,” a third wrote.
