A widespread but partial internet outage on Thursday caused major disruptions across several popular online platforms, following technical issues linked to Google Cloud services. Affected services included Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, Character.ai, UPS, Pokémon and a range of Google’s own Workspace tools.
The outage began to unfold in the early afternoon Pacific Time, with Google confirming on its Cloud status dashboard that its engineers had “identified the root cause” and were taking steps to resolve the problem by 12:41pm and again at 1:16pm. However, some regions experienced a slower return to normal.
By mid-afternoon, Google reported that “our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1,” referring to one of its key data centres in the United States.
Several of the impacted companies later confirmed that their services were beginning to stabilise. By approximately 2pm Pacific Time, outage monitoring website Downdetector — owned by Ziff Davis, parent company of CNET — showed that reports of service issues were rapidly declining across the board.
Google subsequently updated its Workspace status page to confirm the restoration of its services. “The problem with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Cloud Search, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Tasks, and Google Voice has been resolved,” the tech giant stated at 12:53pm PT. “We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”
The outage highlights the broad dependency of both businesses and consumers on cloud infrastructure, with brief disruptions capable of rippling across global digital communications, logistics, and productivity tools.
