Google, OpenAI, Spotify, other platforms experience outage, affecting tens of thousands of users

Amazon Web Services, Google, OpenAI and Spotify were down on Thursday after a widespread technology outage.

A large number of sites appear to have been impacted, with tens of thousands of users reporting issues on Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages. Reports started to escalate around 2 p.m. EST. 

In a statement on its website Thursday afternoon, Cloudflare, which provides services to several major companies impacted by the outage, said that a number of its services were suffering intermittent failures and that it was investigating the matter. 

By 3:12 p.m EST, the global cloud company said services were starting to recover. "We still expect to see intermittent errors across the impacted services as systems handle retried and caches are filled," it stated in an update. 

The source of the outage is Google Cloud, according to a spokesperson for the company. 

"A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted," the spokesperson told CBS News. "We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted." 

Google Cloud started reporting issues with its Google Cloud Platform products on Thursday at 2:46 p.m. The company had more than 13,000 reports of disruptions on Downdetector.com. By 3:30 p.m., the company said most of it services had been recovered, but did not say when they would be fully operational.

"We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services," a spokesperson for Google Cloud told CBS News. "Please view our public status dashboard for the latest updates," they added. 

"We do not have an ETA for full-service recovery," the most recent update on the site states.Spotify had the most outages, with 46,000 users reporting issues as of 3 p.m. EST on Thursday. Spotify did not immediately respond to CBS News' request for comment. 

Other sites impacted include:

1. Discord
2. Google Meet
3. Snapchat
4. Character AI
5. YouTube
6. Box
7. Etsy
8. Pokémon Trading Card Game
9. Cloudflare
10. MailChimp
11. UPS
12. FuboTV
13. Rocket League
14. Verizon
15. Vimeo
16. Shopify
17. HighLevel
18. Paramount+ (CBS News and Paramount+ are owned by Paramount Global)
19. Claude