A massive wave of online service outages rippled across the internet on Thursday afternoon, with a broad swath of popular platforms experiencing simultaneous disruptions.
Real-time data from outage tracker Downdetector showed a dramatic surge in user reports for companies including Spotify, Google, Discord and Snapchat. Late Thursday, Google said it resolved the global service outage impacting multiple platforms.
“The issue with Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, Google Voice has been resolved for all affected users,” the company said. “We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation.”
The spike began shortly before 2:00 p.m. ET, with Spotify logging over 40,000 problem reports, by far the highest among affected platforms. Discord followed with more than 11,000 reports, and Google — which includes services like Search, Maps, and Gmail — registered over 10,800.
Snapchat users reported more than 3,500 outages.
“We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services. Please view our public status dashboard for the latest updates,” a Google Cloud spokesperson told The Post.
Snapchat posted on its official X account: “We’re aware that some Snapchatters are having issues – hang tight, we’re looking into it!”
“Discord was experiencing service interruptions impacting a limited variety of features due to a separate issue with our hosting provider earlier. Service has since fully recovered,” a spokesperson for the company told The Post.
Each platform showed nearly identical outage patterns: a prolonged period of normal activity followed by a sudden and steep rise in problem submissions starting early afternoon.
The uniformity of the spikes has raised questions about whether a shared infrastructure provider or network routing issue may be involved, though no cause has yet been confirmed.
Affected users have reported problems ranging from login failures and dropped server connections to app crashes and total service unavailability.
Downdetector only registers an incident when the number of reports substantially exceeds the usual volume for that time of day, suggesting that Wednesday’s disruptions are far outside the norm.
At the peak of the disruption, there were about 46,000 outage reports on Spotify and 10,992 on Discord in the US. As of 6:18 p.m. ET, Spotify showed a little over 1,000 reports, while Discord outages had come down to 200.
With Post wires
source: https://nypost.com/2025/06/12/business/google-cloud-users-report-widespread-outages-across-us/
