Spotify, Discord, and Snapchat were all experiencing issues on Tuesday, with early reports indicating that a brief Google Cloud outage could have been the culprit.
According to widespread reports of issues on the real-time outage monitoring system Down Detector, nearly 53,000 users had reported issues at Spotify as of 1:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, prompting the platform to tweet that it was “aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted.”
Discord, which had about 41,000 reports of problems, and Snapchat, which received about 84,000 reports of outages, did not immediately issue statements addressing the problems, but Down Detector shows that the reports of outages began flowing in around 1 p.m. ET for all three services. The problems initially seemed to be mostly concentrated in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, with other major cities across the country also seeming to take a hit.
We’re aware of some issues right now and are checking them out! We’ll keep you posted.
— Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) November 16, 2021
In addition to the three aforementioned platforms, a slew of company websites also seemed to be experiencing outages on Tuesday, including (but not limited to): Home Depot, Amazon Web Services, Etsy, Paramount+ and Shopify, Mailchimp, and Frontier.
Although Down Detector was still displaying a banner ad for widespread reports of outages at Google Cloud around 1:30 p.m., an update posted on the service’s status page at 1:17 p.m. declared that “the issue with Cloud Networking is partially resolved,” and many of the affected sites appeared to be coming back online.
Tuesday’s outages come just under a month after a massive outage took Facebook and Instagram offline twice in one week. During the first of those dual outages, experts estimate that Facebook lost approximately $US60 (A$82) million in revenue as engineers labored for more than six hours to bring the services back online.
This is a developing story…