Is Spotify Down? Yes – And So Are Twitch, Discord, and Dozens More in Global Outage

A widespread internet outage has left millions of users frustrated as major websites and online services including Spotify, Etsy, Discord, Twitch, and Google services experienced significant disruptions on Thursday, 12 June.

The issues, which began shortly after 2 p.m. ET, appear to be linked to a major cloud services outage affecting Google Cloud and Cloudflare.

According to Tom's Guide, the disruption is affecting more than 50 online services. Among those hit are Gmail, Google Drive, YouTube, Google Meet, and Google Nest, alongside popular entertainment and retail platforms like Shopify, Doordash, Snapchat, and Pokemon Trading Card Game. Even services like Anthropic's Claude, Marvel, IKEA, Calendly, and MLB.tv have not been spared.

Cloudflare and Google at the Centre of the Issue

Cloudflare, a major IT service provider responsible for hosting and security across the web, reported what it called 'broad service outages' on its status dashboard Thursday afternoon. The company confirmed it was 'continuing to investigate the issue', though no definitive cause has yet been shared.

At the same time, Google Cloud confirmed it was facing global issues, with its own status page listing outages across essential services like Google Cloud Storage, Identity Platform, Cloud Console, and Dataproc. Google also acknowledged service degradation for Workspace tools such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Docs, Voice and Tasks.

Users Flock to X Amid Ongoing Frustration

Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) lit up with reports and confusion from users struggling to access everyday digital tools. The official Spotify Status account acknowledged the issue, saying: 'Something's not quite right, and we're looking into it!'

According to Mashable, the mass outage spans both productivity tools and entertainment apps, including Rocket League, GitLab, Vimeo, and even Equifax, with services either completely inaccessible or running with heavy errors.

Error Spikes Documented by DownDetector

Internet monitoring site DownDetector logged a surge of user complaints beginning around 2 p.m., with reports indicating that:

• Spotify was unreachable
• Discord was experiencing intermittent disconnections
• Google Meet, Gmail, and Search were down for many
• Twitch saw outages that appeared to be receding by mid-afternoon
• Character.AI, a popular AI chatbot platform, was among the hardest hit

The full list of affected services includes dozens more and continues to evolve as the situation unfolds.

No Word Yet on Root Cause

As of this writing, none of the cloud service providers have identified the root cause of the outage, though experts speculate it could involve either a routing issue, a malfunction in global DNS services, or an internal systems failure that is cascading across interlinked platforms.

Google has stated on its Workspace Status Dashboard that they are actively investigating the disruption and will provide updates 'shortly'. Meanwhile, Nest, one of Google's smart home product lines, posted its own update noting outages in Setup & Pairing, Nest Apps, and Live Video feeds.

When Will Services Be Restored?

With Cloudflare and Google actively investigating and mitigating failures, it remains unclear when full functionality will be restored across platforms. Historically, such outages can last anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on the underlying issue.

This remains a developing story. We will continue to update this article as further information becomes available.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that AWS was experiencing disruptions. A spokesperson has since confirmed there are no broad service issues. AWS has been removed from the list of affected services.