It's not WW3. Spotify, Discord, Google Cloud had a wobble

Spotify, Discord, Google Cloud, and possibly some other online services suffered technical breakdowns today, preventing netizens from using them as expected.

Those hoping to chat away with pals on Discord faced endless reloading screens. Spotify users were booted out of their accounts and unable to log back in. Google Cloud reported errors on its load balancers.

Discord said it spotted issues with its API and push notifications at 0916 PT (1716 UTC), and pinpointed the root cause. Half an hour later, it admitted "a new issue has occurred causing a major outage of the API," and that it was consulting with its partners to identify the issue.

By 1215 PT, it said its service was getting back on its feet: "Remediations are working and traffic is coming back online. While we work to restore full service some functionality will remain intentionally disabled until the service stabilizes, typing events and message acknowledgement. Other functionality remains to be restored, media embeds may not work correctly at this time."

Spotify said a couple of hours ago, "Users are currently being logged out of Spotify and unable to log back in. This seems to be affecting mostly the mobile app." Now it says: "We’re happy to say that users now should be able to log back in. If you’re still having issues, try restarting your device."

Google Cloud reported "elevated HTTP 500s on some Google Cloud Load Balancers" in its us-east1 region, and is investigating. The internet giant explained:

It may well be that Google Cloud's intermittent issues caused a knock-on effect for Discord and Spotify today.

Downdetector.com showed spikes in complaints from netizens about a range of services, including AWS and Cloudflare. But Amazon's status page for its web services showed no issues – and AWS disputes the accuracy of Downdetector – while Cloudflare said everything was working fine despite online gripes.

"We have seen reports," a Cloudflare spokesperson to The Register. "We don't see any issues with Cloudflare's systems and traffic is flowing normally. There's no evidence of an increase in attack traffic. Some services where outages are being reported are not Cloudflare customers, so it's unlikely Cloudflare is the cause."

There were also reports that Wikipedia also took a brief dive for some, although the site to us is up and running.

As an aside, The Register reported last week that cloud status pages and complaints from netizens do not always reflect reality, for various technical and non-technical reasons. There are fears that Russia may step up its cyberwarfare against the West in response to sanctions against Moscow for invading Ukraine – so any outages set off alarm bells in people's heads – though so far, there's been little sign of any significant increase in such activity. ®