On Wednesday afternoon, a significant wave of service outages struck the internet, affecting numerous widely-used platforms all at once.
According to live data from Downdetector, there was a noticeable upsurge in user complaints concerning companies such as Spotify, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Discord, and Snapchat.
The increase began just before 2:00 p.m. ET, with Spotify receiving more than 40,000 issue reports, marking the highest number among impacted services. Discord experienced over 11,000 reports, while Google, encompassing services like Search, Maps, and Gmail, encountered more than 10,800 reports.
Other affected services include Amazon Web Services, which saw nearly 5,000 reports, and Snapchat, with more than 3,500.
Each platform showed nearly identical outage patterns: a prolonged period of normal activity followed by a sudden and steep rise in problem submissions starting early afternoon.
The uniformity of the spikes has raised questions about whether a shared infrastructure provider or network routing issue may be involved, though no cause has yet been confirmed.
Google Cloud and AWS, two of the largest cloud infrastructure providers in the world, both experienced noticeable upticks, but neither has released a statement attributing the outages to a service failure on their end.
Affected users have reported problems ranging from login failures and dropped server connections to app crashes and total service unavailability.
Downdetector only registers an incident when the number of reports substantially exceeds the usual volume for that time of day, suggesting that Wednesday’s disruptions are far outside the norm.
The New York Post has reached out to Google, Amazon, Discord, Spotify and Snapchat for comment.
As of mid-afternoon, none of the companies had provided an official explanation.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
