Major outage hits, taking down Spotify, Google cloud

ISTANBUL

A major internet outage has struck the users, taking down dozens of popular websites on Thursday.

Several major platforms, including Spotify and the messaging app Discord, experienced outages affecting tens of thousands of users.

The disruptions were linked to a service issue with Alphabet’s Google Cloud, which reported that multiple products were facing different degrees of performance problems.

"Our engineers are continuing to mitigate the issue and we have confirmation that the issue is recovered in some locations," Google Cloud said.

The disruption is believed to stem from technical problems with Google Cloud, which powers much of the internet’s behind-the-scenes infrastructure.

According to Downdetector, over 10,000 users in the US reported issues with Google Cloud, while Spotify saw more than 44,000 outage reports around 2:46 p.m. ET. The platform, which tracks service disruptions by compiling user-submitted data, also recorded over 4,000 reports each for Google Meet and the Google search engine, and more than 8,000 for the messaging app Discord.

Attempts to reach Discord were unsuccessful, and Spotify has yet to respond to requests for comment.

As Downdetector’s data is based on user reports, the actual number of affected users may differ.