A widespread outage on Thursday affected two of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure providers—Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS)—resulting in disruptions across numerous high-traffic digital platforms in the United States. According to Downdetector, over 13,000 users in the US reported issues with GCP, while more than 6,000 flagged problems with AWS.
Although AWS responded by stating that their services were operating normally and that no broad service disruption had occurred, user reports across the internet suggested otherwise. The AWS Health Dashboard, the official status tracker, did not reflect any systemic issues at the time. In contrast, Google has not yet issued a formal response to the outage.
Major platforms affected include Spotify, Twitch, and Google services
Among the services impacted were widely used platforms like Spotify, Discord, Google Meet, Twitch, and Snapchat. Additional reports highlighted issues with Google Drive, Google Nest, Etsy, Box, Character.AI, Rocket League, and others. These disruptions underscore the heavy reliance of consumer applications on cloud infrastructure, and how outages in a few providers can ripple across dozens of digital ecosystems simultaneously.
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While some affected platforms responded to user concerns on social media, most had not released formal statements by the time of reporting. The root cause of the outage remains unclear, and it is not yet confirmed whether the incidents were interrelated or coincidental.
Cloud dependency raises infrastructure resilience concerns
The incident raises fresh concerns over the resilience and redundancy of the internet’s most critical infrastructure. As enterprises and services continue to centralize their operations on hyperscale cloud platforms, the cascading impact of a service degradation or failure grows exponentially. This also highlights the limited visibility the public has into real-time cloud health, which is often dependent on official dashboards or post-incident transparency.
Despite the increasing number of companies offering distributed cloud and edge services, hyperscalers like GCP and AWS continue to dominate the global market—making the impact of even minor outages significant.
