Google, Spotify, more online services recovering after apparent widespread issue

(NEXSTAR) Following widespread outages on Thursday afternoon, numerous websites and online services, including Spotify, DoorDash, and Google services, were beginning to return to normal. Downdetector, an outage tracker, revealed that user-reported issues increased for dozens of websites and services, peaking shortly after 2 p.m. ET.
For Spotify alone, more than 40,000 such reports were filed. Users reported being unable to load or use the app there. For Discord, more than 12,000 users reported issues sending messages or establishing a server connection. Other sites, apps, and services with reported problems included Snapchat, Pokémon Go, Etsy, Fubo, and Mailchimp.
This weekend, a geomagnetic storm could trigger the northern lights: what you need to know Thousands of users also reported problems accessing or using Google resources, like its website, Cloud, Meet, Nest, Drive, and Gmail. The company’s Search status dashboard showed no incidents as of Thursday afternoon. The same message was initially displayed on the Workspace dashboard before it linked to an update that was posted just before 4 p.m. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Cloud Search, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Tasks, and Google Voice were among the services affected by the issue, according to ET. In the meantime, the Google Cloud status website indicated that incidents had been reported worldwide. around 3 p.m., a notice was posted on the status site. ET reported that “multiple [Cloud] products are experiencing impact due to Identity and Access Management Service Issue.”
After reporting that its engineering team was investigating the issue, a notice on the status site said the root cause had been identified and “appropriate mitigations” had been applied.
Companies can use Google Cloud's computing services to host their apps, data, and other data. One company listed as a Google Cloud client, Shopify, also saw a spike in outage reports on Thursday.
In the meantime, Spotify's support account on X advised users who were having trouble accessing the streaming service to try a different browser. One post specifically asked if the user was having trouble “only with [Google] Chrome.” In response to posts remarking on issues with its services, however, Google responded that “there aren’t any known service disruptions” before asking the users to “try clearing cache & cookies.”