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- Google Cloud to blame
It's never good when an outage hits a service you rely on regularly, but it's even worse when a widespread outage takes down multiple websites and apps. If you're trying to use Spotify, Discord, or Wikipedia, only to run into some major hiccups, it's not just you.
A significant outage is affecting several of the web's most popular platforms, interrupting everything from in-game chat sessions to your workout playlist. We first noticed issues with Spotify, with Downdetector listing more than 150,000 reports of users facing trouble logging in and loading their music library. Discord, Wikipedia, and several other services have also faced an onslaught of issues over the last half an hour or so.
While these issues are all happening concurrent, it doesn't seem like they're all related. Discord's status log reports an API bug as the root cause of its outage. As for Spotify and the rest of the affected services, we'll have to wait and see when those problems are finally resolved. Although services like AWS and Cloudflare received user report spikes on Downdetector, neither service experienced an outage according to their official dashboards, a situation later confirmed by Amazon.
UPDATE: 2022/03/08 19:06 EST BY WILL SATTELBERG
Google Cloud to blame
It's been a few hours since Spotify, Discord, and a handful of other sites experienced a hiccup that could be heard around the world social media, and now we finally know what caused it. As reported by The Verge, Google Cloud is at fault this time, after the platform pushed an update to its Traffic Director that seemingly broke, well, everything.
Discord has directly referenced Cloud on its outage page, and while we don't have quite as much information on Spotify, a Google case study makes it clear that the streaming service is a customer. Also, the timeframe lines up perfectly with today's interruption. So if you were wondering why you couldn't blast Carly Rae Jepsen at the gym earlier today, now you know.
UPDATE: 2022/03/08 15:16 EST BY WILL SATTELBERG
Service restored
Your afternoon work sessions have been saved, as Spotify is coming back for users across the web. If you were logged out of your account, try logging back in to access your music collection.
Meanwhile, Discord is starting to come back online, though its status page notes that some functionality, including media embeds, may take some time to return fully. In general, user reports on Downdetector are falling for all the previously affected sites and services.