An internet outage affecting websites using Google Cloud services caused problems around the world on Thursday.
DownDetector, which reports global internet issues, showed that the cut was affecting Spotify, Discord, Snapchat and other brands.
"Multiple Google Cloud Platform products are experiencing impact due to identity and access management service issue," read a post on the Google Cloud service health page.
"We have identified the root cause and applied appropriate mitigations," read an update to the page, stopping short of going into further details.
"We are seeing signs of recovery ... we expect the recovery to complete in less than an hour," a subsequent message explained.
The number of services affected is vast and actively expanding as of the time of writing.
"This is a Google Cloud outage," a spokesperson for Cloudflare said in a brief email to The National.
"A limited number of services at Cloudflare that use Google Cloud were impacted and we expect them to come back online shortly," she added.
As can be expected, even amid the problem, there was ample speculation about the sheer volume of the outage.
"Google Cloud Platform outage and Cloudflare major outage at the same time. Never seen this before," Substack technology newsletter writer Gergely Orosz wrote on X.
Whatever the cause, the issue has not yet been resolved.
Though rare, similar cuts in the past have resulted in billions of dollars lost due to the down-time and lack of commerce.
Although not responsible for the cause of the outage, several companies, such as OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, also issued statements.
"We are aware of issues affecting multiple external internet providers, impacting the availability of our services such as single sign-on and other log-in methods," the company posted on X.
"Our engineering teams are working to mitigate these issues."
Late on Thursday evening, Google said that service had been completely restored to all of its products throughout all of its regions.
"We regret the disruption this caused our customers," said Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud.
Cloudflare, which was also affected by the Google outage, said that all of its services were back up and running within 2 hours and 28 minutes.
"We’re deeply sorry for this outage: this was a failure on our part, and while the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them," the company said.
