Major tech outage, led by Google Cloud, impacts U.S. users coast to coast (UPDATE)
T-Mobile remains down after a major tech outage led by issues with Google Cloud is clearing up.
UPDATE: Despite Downdetector receiving a number of complaints about T-Mobile's service going down Thursday afternoon, the carrier wrote to tell us that the problems that we described below, starting with Google Cloud, did not impact T-Mobile. As we noted in the article, the inclusion of T-Mobile in this article came from Downdetector. To reiterate, T-Mobile says that Thursday's outage did not affect its network.
The original story follows:
Big tech names fell like dominoes this afternoon as a major outage hit U.S. users from coast to coast. It seemed to start with Google Cloud which reported problems starting at 2:46 PM EDT. On its status page, Google said that issues with Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, and Google Voice were resolved for all users by 3:48 pm EDT.
At the same time, websites and apps such as Cloudflare, the Pokemon Trading Card Game, Amazon Web Services, Life360, Spotify, T-Mobile, UPS, and OpenAI were also having problems. A spokesman for global cloud company Cloudflare told CBS News earlier this afternoon, "A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted."
Issues with Google Cloud led big tech names to go down this afternoon. | Image credit-Downdetector
Google Cloud complaints at Downdetector soared from 1 at 1:29 pm EDT to nearly 15,000 an hour later. The last report showed 200 complaints at 6:29 pm EDT. 59% had issues with a server connection, 21% had problems with a website, and 20% had issues with Google Cloud hosting a website.
A complete list of affected platforms includes:
- Discord
- Google Meet
- Snapchat
- Spotify
- Gmail
- Google Cloud
- Google Nest
- DoorDash
- Character AI
- YouTube
- Box
- Etsy
- Pokémon Trading Card Game
- Pokémon Go
- Cloudflare
- Mailchimp
- UPS
- FuboTV
- Amazon Web Services
- Rocket League
- Verizon
- Vimeo
- Shopify
- HighLevel
- Paramount+ (CBS News and Paramount+ are owned by Paramount Global)
- Claude
- D&D Beyond
- T-Mobile
- Clover
- Phasmophobia
- Ecobee
- HighLevel
- Dragon Ball
- Procore
- NPM
- Dialpad
- Dave
- OpenAI
- Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft 365
- DeviantArt
- Fitbit
- Marvel Contest of Champions
- Cursor
- Wix
- Zoom
- Google Gemini
- Spectrum
- Roblox
- AT&T
- reCAPTCHA
T-Mobile is still considered down at Downdetector as of 7 pm EDT. | Image credit-Downdetector
T-Mobile outages were reported in Minneapolis, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, St. Cloud, Sylvania, Houston, San Diego, and Seattle.
Personally, I noticed this afternoon that in places where I can normally access Verizon's 5G Ultra Wideband service, I was stuck with 4G LTE before 5G service returned. According to Downdetector, complaints about Verizon service peaked at 754 at 3:26 pm EDT compared to a baseline of 77.
Right now, Downdetector says, "User reports indicate no current problems at Verizon" as the nation's largest carrier has 99 complaints from subscribers compared to a baseline of 66. T-Mobile, on the other hand, still has five times the number of complaints than its baseline. This explains why Downdetector still lists it as being down.
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