Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud and music streaming platform Spotify were down for more than two hours Thursday, leaving thousands of customers without service, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
“We are experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products,” a Google Cloud status page showed, indicating outages began at 1:51 p.m. ET. “Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue.” The company said the incident caused problems for 13 of its cloud services across the U.S., Europe and Asia.
The cause of the outage, which impacted users of Google Maps, Google Meet, Google Cloud and YouTube, was not immediately known. Google’s Nest security cameras are also offline for some. Google subsequently blamed an invalid automated quota update to Google Cloud’s API management system for the outage, claiming almost full recovery within two hours.
Sebastian Pfeiffer, managing director of Impossible Cloud Network, said the disruption further demonstrates the enormous vulnerability of “archaic” infrastructure that is “crumbling” under the pressure of modern-day cloud computing demand, he said.
More than 13,000 incidents were reported with Google Cloud and more than 27,000 on Spotify around 2:26 p.m ET, said Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources. The site also showed thousands of people reporting incidents with Amazon Web Services.
E-commerce company Shopify, a major Google cloud customer, also reported problems.
Separately, Cloudflare Inc. said on its status site it was experiencing problems. “We are seeing a number of services suffer intermittent failures,” the page said. “We are continuing to investigate this and we will update “this list as we assess the impact on a per-service level.”
Akamai reported significant traffic drops in major U.S. hubs Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, San Jose, and Dallas.
“A widespread outage [Thursday] brought down major platforms like Spotify, Discord, and Snapchat — not because the apps failed but because Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) service went down,” Mike Towers, chief security and trust officer at Veza, said in an email. “The result? Mass authentication failures and access errors across the web. This incident is a wake-up call: identity is the control plane for the modern enterprise. When identity breaks, business stops — whether its users locked out, AI tools failing, or internal operations grinding to a halt.”
