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Spotify and Discord went down. Don't blame Russia.

The platforms seem to have been taken out by a Google Cloud issue.

Discord logo on a phone

Discord was one of the services taken down by a cloud outage Tuesday.

Photo: Fabian Sommer/picture alliance via Getty Images

Spotify, Discord and several other sites are beginning to recover after experiencing mass outages Tuesday morning.

Users on Twitter said they were unable to access their Spotify accounts and experiencing message failures on their Discord accounts at just before 10 a.m. PT Tuesday morning. According to Down Detector, which tracks website outages, there were 175,000 reports of outages on Spotify and nearly 60,000 reports of outages on Discord by 10:20 a.m. Both Spotify and Discord have acknowledged the issue.

"We’re aware of an issue causing message failures and are working on a fix," Discord tweeted.

The sites and others were likely taken down by an issue with Google Cloud, the cloud service provider they operate on. Google did not immediately respond to request for comment from Protocol. The Google Cloud Status Dashboard said on Tuesday "us-east1: Elevated HTTP 500s on some Google Cloud Load Balancer" — in short, there was an issue with the technology that helps manage the flow of incoming traffic to those servers, causing an outage. (So despite rumors you may have seen or heard on social media, Russia had nothing to do with this.)

However, the sites seem to be recovering. Spotify tweeted that "things are looking better" from the outages this morning, but requested that users reach out if they are still having issues. The Discord status page said that the platform is "continuing to work to restore full functionality," and that "media embeds," "media infrastructure" and "message acknowledgement" are functional again.

Don't worry, if you can't access your "throwback jams to work to" playlist yet, you will be able to soon.

Nat Rubio-Licht

Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.

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