A widespread Google Cloud outage disrupted services like Spotify, Discord, and Cloudflare, highlighting the fragility of global internet infrastructure.
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| A Google Cloud failure triggered internet outages across top platforms like Spotify and Discord, prompting questions about digital infrastructure reliability. Image: CH |
NEW YORK, USA — June 14, 2025:
A massive Google Cloud outage on Thursday caused major disruptions across some of the internet’s most widely used platforms, including Spotify, Discord, and Cloudflare, leaving tens of thousands of users temporarily offline and sparking renewed scrutiny over the resilience of digital infrastructure.
The outage, which began in the afternoon, was quickly traced back to Google Cloud services. At its peak, outage tracking website Downdetector reported approximately 46,000 Spotify users experiencing issues, along with 14,000 Google Cloud users and 11,000 on Discord. Other services such as Snapchat and the AI-based platform Character.ai were also affected.
Cloudflare, whose web infrastructure underpins a significant portion of internet traffic, confirmed that the root cause was a third-party disruption. “This is a Google Cloud outage,” a company representative stated. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”
One of the impacted services, Cloudflare Workers KV, experienced downtime “due to an outage of a third-party service,” as listed on the company’s system status dashboard.
By late Thursday, Google reported that the issue had been resolved. “Following a disruption to a number of Google Cloud services, all products have now been fully restored,” a Google Cloud spokesperson said in a statement.
Spotify, responding to user concerns, referred inquiries to Google Cloud’s service dashboard. Downdetector metrics showed a sharp decline in complaints from late afternoon onward as services gradually resumed.
While disruptions like this are not unprecedented, the scale of impact highlights the central role a few cloud providers play in keeping the internet running. Google Cloud, which handles approximately 25% of global internet traffic as of 2018, accounts for 12% of the cloud services market—behind Amazon Web Services (30%) and Microsoft Azure (21%), according to Synergy Research Group.
Outages from these giants have previously disrupted online services around the globe. A 2021 Amazon Web Services failure caused breakdowns in everything from food deliveries to smart home functions. Similarly, a 2020 Cloudflare outage knocked out numerous websites worldwide.
This latest disruption follows a wave of high-profile tech outages in recent weeks, including service interruptions on ChatGPT and social media platform X (formerly Twitter), underlining growing concerns about the vulnerability of cloud-reliant infrastructures.
As global dependence on digital platforms intensifies, Thursday’s incident serves as a stark reminder that even the biggest players are not immune to cascading technical failures.