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The internet had another collective panic attack today as services like Spotify, Discord, Google, and even Amazon Web Services stumbled to their knees. According to Downdetector, the carnage peaked with over 46,000 Spotify reports, 14,000 for Google Cloud, and 11,000 for Discord.
What triggered the chaos? You can thank a Google Cloud disruption that rippled through everything from streaming music to AI platforms like Character.ai. And for added spice, Cloudflare—which handles backend traffic for a huge chunk of the web—got sideswiped too.
A Cloudflare spokesperson told CNN that their core services weren’t affected, just the ones relying on Google Cloud. Translation: “We’re not down, but a bunch of stuff we use is, so, yeah, we’re kinda down.”
If this all feels familiar, it’s because ChatGPT went offline globally just yesterday, and the internet spiraled into full-blown existential dread. Between that and today’s outage, it’s pretty clear: the web is only as stable as the cloud it floats on.
Cloudflare Workers KV (their key-value storage service) was also knocked out, according to their status dashboard, again due to that third-party dependency on Google Cloud.
As of Thursday afternoon, services have started to come back online, and Cloudflare says things are stabilizing. Spotify, for its part, pointed journalists to Google Cloud’s status page—which is basically corporate speak for, “Don’t ask us, ask the people who broke it.”
In case you’re wondering how big of a deal Google Cloud is: in 2018, they claimed to deliver 25% of global internet traffic. That’s a quarter of the internet, folks. While Amazon still rules the cloud with 30% of the market and Microsoft Azure follows at 21%, Google’s 12% still holds a pretty big chunk of your streaming, syncing, and doomscrolling infrastructure.
So what have we learned? That the modern web is stitched together with third-party clouds and duct tape—and when just one of those services sneezes, the rest of the internet catches the flu.
For more takes on tech disasters, internet fragility, and why we can’t have nice things, head over to NerdNet.