MUMBAI: A massive internet outage on Thursday disrupted multiple major platforms—including Google, Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, and others—after a technical issue affected Google Cloud, the backbone for numerous online services and applications.

The outage impacted not only third-party platforms such as Character.ai and the Pokémon Trading Card Game but also Google’s own core services, including Gmail, Google Search, Maps, and Nest.

According to updates posted on Google’s Cloud status page at 12:41 PM PT and again at 1:16 PM PT, engineers identified the root cause of the disruption and initiated mitigation efforts. While most regions saw recovery, users in the us-central1 region continued to experience slower performance for some time. Later, Google confirmed, “Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1.”

By 6:18 PM PDT, full functionality had been restored. “Vertex AI Online Prediction has fully recovered from the service issue. All affected services are now operating normally,” read the final update on the Cloud status page. Google has promised to release a detailed analysis following the conclusion of its internal investigation and thanked users for their patience.

The issue coincided with service disruptions reported by Cloudflare, though the company clarified that its own core services remained unaffected. “This is a Google Cloud outage,” Cloudflare stated in an email to CNN. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”

Outage tracking site Downdetector reported over 11,000 user complaints related to Google Cloud in India and more than 10,000 in the U.S. However, as Downdetector compiles data from self-reported issues, the actual number of users affected may vary.