Google Cloud outage takes Cloudflare with it

Shopify, Discord and Ocado all affected

An outage at Google Cloud took down multiple popular internet services last night, including Twitch, Discord, Spotify and more.

The problems were first noticed around 19:30 BST, when users began reporting service disruptions across dozens of platforms.

Although not all customers experienced issues, the problems were widespread enough to cause a visible spike on Down Detector.

Hosting service company Cloudflare, whose customers include online supermarket Ocado, women’s health tracker Flo Health and ecommerce platform Shopify, also experienced disruption.

According to Down Detector, the following services were affected:

• Discord
• Google (Google Cloud, Gmail, Google Meet, and others)
• Spotify
• Twitch
• character.ai
• Rocket league
• Cloudflare
• Etsy
• Pokémon Trading card game
• Snapchat
• fuboTV
• Anthropic (maker of Claude)
• Shopify
• Gemini
• MLB.tv
• Doordash
• Ikea
• Equifax
• Marvel
• Vimeo
• Nintendo Switch Online
• Gitlan
• Calendly

Google Cloud’s page about the incident lists a huge number of its own products that were affected, including API Gateway, BigQuery and Vertex.

According to the initial incident report, “the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected.”

Officially the incident only lasted three hours, from 18:49 to 21:49. At this time Google had mitigated the issue in all regions, but certain Google Cloud products continued to experience problems until 2:30 the next day. Vertex AI Online Prediction was the last service to recover.