Google Cloud outage disrupts OpenAI, Spotify, and other major services worldwide

Google Cloud experienced a major global outage on Thursday, disrupting access to a wide range of popular web services and impacting millions of users worldwide. The issue affected at least 13 Google Cloud products across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including services used by OpenAI, Spotify, Shopify, and GitHub.

The disruption began at 10:51 a.m. Pacific Time, according to Google’s cloud status dashboard, with engineers scrambling to identify and resolve the issue. For several hours, users of affected services faced login problems, degraded performance, or complete outages. Google's cloud team confirmed that customers were "still experiencing varying degrees of impact" well into the afternoon, with no immediate timeline for resolution.

By Thursday evening, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian confirmed on social media that the issues had been fully resolved.

Major platforms affected

Among the most high-profile services hit by the outage was OpenAI, which reported issues with user logins and authentication, particularly through single sign-on (SSO). Shopify, a key Google Cloud customer, also acknowledged service disruptions impacting its platform.

Other services that appeared to suffer outages or intermittent failures included Amazon’s Twitch, GitHub, Elastic, CoreWeave’s Weights & Biases, LangChain, Replit, and Mailchimp.

Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider, noted on its own status page that some of its services tied to Google Cloud were experiencing "intermittent failures." Its stock fell 5% following the announcement. A Cloudflare spokesperson emphasized that its core services remained functional and attributed the disruptions specifically to Google Cloud.

A centralized risk too big to ignore

Phil Mataras, founder of the permanent cloud network AR.IO, says Thursday’s incident is just the latest and clearest reminder that an overreliance on centralized cloud providers is a critical vulnerability in the internet’s infrastructure.

“The Google Cloud outage, which affected a wide range of access and services—from Gmail and Maps to Spotify, SnapChat, and Discord—shows how vulnerable the world is in the hands of a few centralized cloud providers,” Mataras said.

“When everything we do depends on the internet, we can’t afford to have the internet break. This is not least due to the massive risk of data loss that these events carry.”

While temporary disruptions to platforms like Spotify or Discord may be frustrating, Mataras warns that the real danger lies in the loss or even permanent disappearance of critical information.

“Losing access to Spotify for a few hours is annoying, but that pales in comparison to losing access to healthcare systems and the data stored inside them - maybe permanently. Such potential losses have huge implications on everything from revenue to productivity, and most significantly, human health and safety.”

Mataras believes the time has come to rethink how cloud infrastructure is built, pointing to decentralized storage and blockchain as long-term solutions:

“In a digital world, the risks of relying on centralized cloud systems for data storage are becoming too high. It is critical that we start to decentralize global cloud systems to reduce the risk of single points of failure and irreversible data loss. Data should be stored permanently and, on the blockchain, it can be - immutably and verifiably.”

“This huge outage is yet another wake-up call that we must start to make that transition,” he concluded.