Google (GOOGL, Financials) said Thursday it resolved a brief but widespread outage that disrupted several of its services — including Gmail, Google Drive, Meet, and Cloud — and cascaded into apps like Spotify, Snapchat, and Discord that rely on its infrastructure.
The disruption, which began around 1:50 p.m. ET, sparked tens of thousands of user reports on Downdetector.com. Spotify logged over 46,000 outage reports at its peak; Discord saw nearly 11,000.
By evening, most services had recovered. Google said it will release a detailed analysis after completing its internal investigation.
A Google Cloud dashboard update confirmed that while most systems were back online, a few services may still experience residual effects.
Though brief, the outage exposed the growing dependency of third-party apps on Google's cloud infrastructure — raising fresh questions about redundancy and resilience in today's digital stack.
