The web stumbled just after 11 a.m. Pacific (2 p.m. ET) on Thursday when back‑to‑back hiccups at two of the world’s largest cloud providers cascaded through the internet’s plumbing. Google Cloud first signaled trouble with an identity‑and‑access‑management (IAM) fault that blocked applications from authenticating. Within minutes, Downdetector’s heat maps lit up: 27,000 Spotify complaints, 15,000 Discord errors, and more than 10,000 Google service alarms.

Even more troubling, Amazon Web Services—whose footprint underpins nearly 40 percent of public‑cloud workloads—also began to see user‑reported failures. Downdetector logged roughly 6,000 AWS outage reports at the peak, with Twitch streams freezing and countless back‑office APIs timing out. While AWS’s own health dashboard continued to show green lights, the sudden spike suggested either downstream dependency pain or knock‑on DNS and routing issues triggered by the Google misfire.

Infrastructure heavyweight Cloudflare wasn’t spared. A subset of its edge and security services run on Google Cloud; once the IAM snag hit, Cloudflare’s status page warned of “intermittent failures” across its global network. Engineers rerouted traffic, but for many customers the chain reaction meant 502 errors or blank pages.

By mid‑afternoon Google said it had “identified the root cause” and rolled out mitigations, noting that service was “recovering in some locations.” AWS reiterated that no internal systems were down, yet acknowledged elevated error rates from some regions. Industry observers point to the tight coupling between hyperscale clouds—shared identity providers, overlapping CDN dependencies and complex BGP routes—as the real culprit. When one giant slips, the others feel the tremor.

What the dashboards say right now

• Google Cloud still lists the incident as “Active” affecting multiple products. No all-clear or end-time is posted.

• Cloudflare reports its own knock-on incident tied to the same Google Cloud problem; traffic is “recovering” but the investigation remains open.

• AWS tells reporters its services are not impaired, despite spikes on DownDetector. There is no matching incident on the AWS Health Dashboard.