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Days after OpenAI and Google Cloud announced a partnership to support the growing use of generative AI platforms, much of the AI-powered web and tools went down due to an outage of the leading cloud providers.
Google Cloud Service Platform (GCP) and some Cloudflare services began experiencing issues around 10:00 a.m. PT today, affecting several AI development tools and data storage services, including ChatGPT and Claude, as well as a variety of other AI platforms.
A GCP spokesperson confirmed the outage to VentureBeat, urging users to check its public status dashboard.
GCP said affected services include API Gateway, Agent Assist, Cloud Data Fusion, Contact Center AI Platform, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Identity Platform, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech and Vertex AI Search, among other tools. Google’s mobile development platform, Firebase, also went down.
VentureBeat staffers had trouble accessing Google Meet, but other Google services on Workspace remained online.
A Cloudflare spokesperson told VentureBeat only “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.”
Despite media reports and user-provided feedback on Down Detector, AWS stated that its service remains up, including AI platforms such as Bedrock and Sagemaker.
OpenAI acknowledged some users had issues logging into their platforms but have since resolved the problem. Anthropic noted on its status page that Claude experienced “elevated error rates on the API, console and Claude AI.”
Developer tools like LlamaIndex’s LlamaCloud, Weights & Biases, Windsurf, Supabase and Replit reported issues. Other platforms like Character AI also announced they were affected.
In addition to AI tools, other websites and internet services, such as Spotify and Discord, also reportedly went down.
Needing more cloud
In many ways, the outage highlights the challenges of relying on a single cloud service or database provider and the risks associated with an interconnected Internet. If one of your cloud services goes down, it could impact some users whose log-in or data stream is hosted there.
Google Cloud has been gradually wresting market leadership in enterprise AI from its competitors, thanks to the large number of developer and database tools it has begun offering organizations. On the other hand, Cloudflare has been partnering with companies like Hugging Face to deploy AI apps faster.
First reported by Reuters, Google and OpenAI have struck a deal that will allow OpenAI to utilize Google Cloud to meet the growing demand on its platform.
But that’s not to say Google or Cloudflare may lose an edge among enterprise AI users who depend on consistent uptime. While the company continues to investigate the cause of the outage, enterprises often have, and should have, redundancies in case their provider goes down. Outages happen, and they happen far too frequently.
The last massive outage happened around the same time last year, in July, when CrowdStrike accidentally triggered outages that impacted Microsoft Windows users.
In typical fashion, many people saw the outages as an opportunity for comedy, or at least to catch up on tasks they’d been putting off.
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