Major Tech Outage Hits Google, OpenAI, Spotify, and Other Platforms, Impacting Thousands of Users

On Thursday, major platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google, OpenAI, and Spotify experienced a widespread technology outage, affecting a significant number of users.

Reports of issues started to surface around 2 p.m. EST, with tens of thousands of users reporting problems on Downdetector.com, a site that monitors outages.

Cloudflare, a service provider for several affected companies, acknowledged the intermittent failures and stated that they were investigating the situation.

By 3:12 p.m. EST, Cloudflare mentioned that services were beginning to recover, although intermittent errors were still expected as the systems stabilized.

The root cause of the outage was identified as Google Cloud, according to a spokesperson for the company.

Google Cloud reported disruptions with its products at 2:46 p.m. on Thursday, with over 13,000 outage reports on Downdetector.com. By 3:30 p.m., most services had been restored, but full operational status was not confirmed.

Google Cloud is actively investigating the service disruption and directing users to their public status dashboard for updates.

Spotify was heavily impacted, with 46,000 users reporting issues by 3 p.m. EST on Thursday. However, Spotify did not provide immediate comments on the situation.