Topline
Several major platforms including Google Cloud, Cloudflare and Spotify appeared to experience technical issues or outages Thursday, with outage reports on Downdetector.com spiking throughout the afternoon and internet company Cloudflare reporting broad service outages—though most issues were resolved by the evening.
Google Cloud experienced disruptions to some of its services. (Photo Illustration by Algi Febri … More
Key Facts
Cloudflare, which serves tens of millions of web requests per second, said at 2:46 p.m. EDT it was seeing “a number of services suffer intermittent failures”, before noting at 4:57 p.m. EDT all services were fully restored.
Cloudflare told Forbes in an email the issues experienced Thursday were the result of a Google Cloud outage, noting a “limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted.”
Google Cloud also reported problems with many of its cloud products across the globe, and said at 5:23 p.m. EDT most of its products had recovered (Google confirmed in an email to Forbes it was investigating disruptions to some services).
Outage reports of Amazon Web Services made on Downdetector reached nearly 6,000 at 2:49 p.m. EDT before declining to 1,400 by 3:53 p.m. EDT, though the cloud computing platform reported no issues on its status page throughout the day.
Amazon contacted Forbes saying reports that AWS is down “are inaccurate,” and that AWS services are “operating normally,” but did not offer an explanation for the widespread complaints.
Other websites and platforms with spikes in reported issues included Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, YouTube, Gmail, Google Meet and Etsy, with outage reports largely decreasing by 3:55 p.m. EDT.
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Contra
Social media platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram appeared to be largely spared by the outages, with just a few hundred outage reports cumulatively being made on Downdetector.
Tangent
While social media platforms were largely unimpacted by Thursday’s web issues, X, formerly known as Twitter, ran into several outages throughout May, with users submitting tens of thousands of outage reports on Downdetector. The problems with the social media platform caught the attention of its billionaire owner and Tesla chief Elon Musk, who said he was “back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms” and that X needed “major operational improvements.” Prior to the end of his time as a special government employee with the Trump administration, critics and shareholders of Musk’s many companies expressed concern he was spending too much of his time on politics, pointing to his role as Trump’s cost-cutting czar.
Key Background
Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are among the top cloud providers in the U.S., providing infrastructure crucial to the internet’s functionality. Market insights firm HG Insights estimated in a 2024 report that Google Cloud’s market share reached 28% among top cloud service providers. Similar to Thursday’s issues, the platform experienced problems with some of its products four separate times in 2024, though the issues did not impact nearly as many regions as they did Thursday.
Further Reading
X Outage: Elon Musk-Owned Platform’s Latest Disruption (Forbes)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/06/12/major-websites-experience-technical-issues-amid-widespread-internet-outage/