Alphabet’s Google announced on Thursday that it had resolved a brief but widespread outage that disrupted access to multiple services dependent on its cloud infrastructure. Affected Google services included Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Voice, Google Tasks, and Google Cloud Search. The company confirmed that all services have now been restored and promised a detailed analysis of the incident once its internal investigation concludes.
The disruption, which began around 1:50 p.m. ET, impacted several major platforms that rely on Google Cloud, including popular music streamer Spotify, messaging service Discord, and social media platform Snapchat. These services experienced temporary outages due to the failure of Google’s cloud infrastructure.
According to Downdetector.com, a real-time outage tracking platform, reports of issues with Google Cloud surged to 14,729 around 2:32 p.m. ET. At the peak of the service interruption, Spotify experienced approximately 46,000 user-submitted outage reports in the U.S., while Discord reported nearly 11,000. The numbers steadily declined as Google restored its services, with Spotify outages dropping to just over 1,000 and Discord down to about 200 reports by 6:18 p.m. ET.
Although Downdetector’s figures are based on user reports and may not reflect the total number of users affected, they illustrate the scale of the disruption. Many businesses and consumer platforms that rely heavily on Google’s cloud infrastructure felt the impact during the hours-long service failure.
Google Cloud’s status dashboard noted that, while most services were functioning normally again, engineering teams continued to monitor for any residual effects. The outage highlights the vast interconnectedness of cloud-dependent services and how disruptions in core infrastructure can ripple across various sectors almost instantaneously.
Google has not yet disclosed the root cause of the disruption but has assured users that a comprehensive incident report will be published following a complete internal review.
