Google Cloud, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Shopify are just a few of the companies that experienced outages this week, impacting the productivity of countless users worldwide. After scrambling to bring their systems back online as fast as possible, nearly everything seems to be operating as usual at the time of this writing on Friday, June 13.
Here’s a brief overview of when the outages occurred and how the primary company involved responded.
Google Cloud
Issues with Google Cloud began on Thursday, June 12. Since many popular websites rely on Google Cloud, this caused a domino effect that resulted in other services including GitHub, Mailchimp, and Twitch experiencing disruptions at various points during the day.
According to Downdetector, there were more than 13,000 separate outage reports involving Google Cloud at approximately 2:30 p.m. ET. Thanks to a quick response by the team at Google, all of their services were restored by 9:35 p.m. on June 12.
OpenAI
While OpenAI also experienced issues yesterday, the company’s troubles began on Tuesday, June 10, at approximately 3:00 a.m. ET. when there were widespread issues for web, desktop, and mobile users. Not only did these outages affect its flagship product, the generative AI tool ChatGPT, but it also affected Dall-E, Sora, WhatsApp, Perplexity, and many other services that rely on OpenAI. The company moved swiftly to correct the issue on its end.
Unfortunately, there were more service outages on June 12; according to Downdetecter, OpenAI had nearly 500 outage reports at 2:30 p.m. ET. However, by the afternoon of Friday, June 13, that number was down to only a couple dozen unresolved reports.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare, a major provider of cloud storage, network services, and cybersecurity, experienced a “significant service outage” on Thursday, June 12 that disrupted several of its services. The outage lasted less than three hours, and the issue was pinpointed to an infrastructure failure within one of its data storage services.
The team at Cloudflare took full responsibility for the outage while reassuring customers with the following statement: “This was not the result of an attack or other security event. No data was lost as a result of this incident.”
Shopify
One of the most popular e-commerce platforms, Shopify, was also affected. The service peaked with more than 750 outage reports at 2:44 p.m. ET on Thursday, June 12.
Shortly after 3:00 p.m., Shopify Support posted the following update to its X profile: “We’re aware of an issue impacting several services. We are investigating and will provide more information once available.”
Downdetector reported Spotify had less than 20 outages by 12:00 p.m. ET on Friday, June 13, indicating the issue is close to being resolved.
Restoring service around the globe
The quick response by the companies involved highlights the dedication of developers and IT engineers in particular. Not only did each company address and acknowledge these issues as soon as they came to light, but most of them were able to resolve them within a span of several hours and restore service to users around the globe. Although Google and OpenAI are still experiencing intermittent issues, these are currently being addressed by their respective development teams.
