A visitor walks past a Google Cloud sign at the booth of Google during the Hanover technology Fair (Hannover Messe) on April 22, 2024 in Hanover, northern Germany, with Norway as partner country.
Ronny Hartmann | AFP | Getty Images
Google’s cloud suffered significant global outages on Thursday, knocking down or disrupting a number of large internet services.
“We are experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products,” a status page from Google Cloud showed, indicating that the outages began at 10:51 a.m. PT. “Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue.”
Later in the day, Google said that customers were “still experiencing varying degrees of impact” and that engineers were working to recover service, but that the company didn’t have an ETA for the fix.
The outages are a setback for Google, which is trying to keep pace in cloud infrastructure with larger rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The cloud unit, led by Thomas Kurian, has been one of the faster-growing segments of Google in recent years and is benefiting from demand for artificial intelligence products and services.
E-commerce software vendor Shopify, a major Google cloud customer, said in a post on X that it’s “aware of an issue impacting several services.” And OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said it was experiencing some problems related to single sign-on “and other log-in methods.” The company said in a social media post that its “engineering teams are working to mitigate these issues.”
The Downdetector website showed over 13,000 reported incidents for Google Cloud at around 11:30 a.m. PT, though that number was down dramatically by early afternoon.
“We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services,” a Google spokesperson said in an email, and pointed to the dashboard for updates.
Alphabet has been slashing cuts, implementing layoffs in its sales, customer experience, internal deal and go-to-market teams, CNBC reported in February.
While Downdetector also showed reports of disruptions with AWS, a spokesperson for the company said there were no issues.
Google’s status page said the incident had caused problems for 13 of its cloud services, across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Other web services that appeared to suffer disruptions included Amazon’s Twitch, CoreWeave’s Weights and Biases, Elastic, GitLab, LangChain, Microsoft’s GitHub, Replit and Intuit’s Mailchimp.
Starting late morning Pacific time, Cloudflare said on its status site that it was experiencing problems. Cloudflare is a major web security and content distribution network provider. The stock fell 5% on Thursday.
“This is a Google cloud outage,” a Cloudflare spokesperson told CNBC, adding that the “limited” number of services using Google Cloud were impacted. Its core services continued to operate normally.
“We are seeing a number of services suffer intermittent failures,” Cloudflare’s page said. “We are continuing to investigate this and we will update “this list as we assess the impact on a per-service level.”
Google Trends pointed to a spike in users searching “Firebase,” which is one of Google’s developer platforms for building and managing web and mobile apps.
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
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