Google Cloud Outage Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions, Affecting Cloudflare, Discord & More

On Thursday afternoon, the internet experienced widespread disruptions affecting hundreds of services—from global platforms like Cloudflare to popular applications such as Spotify and Discord. The root cause was traced to a critical failure within Google Cloud’s infrastructure, a fact confirmed by both Google and Cloudflare.

The initial signs of trouble appeared around 11:46 PT (14:46 ET), prompting Google Cloud to swiftly implement remedial measures. By 14:00 PT, services had begun gradually returning to normal, although the us-central1 node in Iowa remained impaired. Full restoration was promised within the hour.

An unexpected revelation emerged during Cloudflare’s internal investigation: the disruption stemmed from an issue with their Workers KV infrastructure, which relies on a third-party cloud provider. This malfunction led to the failure of 90% of requests to the KV storage system, triggering outages across WARP, Access, Dashboard, Workers AI, and other Cloudflare products. The interruption lasted approximately 2 hours and 28 minutes, after which normal operations resumed.

The impact was not confined to third-party applications—several Google services also experienced outages. Users reported issues with Gmail, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Voice, Lens, and others. By evening, Google confirmed the restoration of all affected services and pledged a thorough investigation, with a full report to follow upon its completion.

Mass complaints surfaced on the DownDetector platform. At the height of the disruption, Spotify logged over 40,000 reports, Discord exceeded 11,000, and similar outages affected Snapchat, Twitch, Anthropic, Shopify, and more—sparking lively discussions across social media. On X, users wryly asked, “Is this the end of the internet?” even as recovery efforts were already underway.

By late Thursday evening, most systems had returned to stable operation. Google officially declared the conclusion of the global outage and the recovery of its core products, including Workspace services. Investigations into the incident’s root causes and mechanisms are ongoing, with results to be published in due course.

This incident underscored the vulnerabilities inherent in monocultural infrastructure. The heavy reliance of numerous services on shared cloud platforms produced a domino effect, emphasizing the need for diversification of providers and the establishment of robust failover systems for mission-critical services.