A massive internet outage is messing up Google Home, Spotify, and other services

On Thursday afternoon, many people with smart home setups connected to Google Home / Nest, or who are trying to stream music on Spotify, are coming up empty. All I’m seeing when I try to open the Spotify website is a message that says “Audiences in Jwt are not allowed,” and opening the app also pops up an error saying it can’t connect. However, previously cached music and podcasts are still playing, and both services are still working for some of our staff members.

We’ve seen issue reports on Downdetector and some error messages pop up for other large cloud-based services, too, like Snapchat and Discord, but so far, it’s not entirely clear what is causing the problem or exactly which platforms are affected.

The status page for Google Cloud doesn’t list any issues at the moment; however, a possible cause could be an outage listed by Cloudflare, which provides network infrastructure and content delivery services to a number of online platforms.

Noting “Broad Cloudflare service outages,” it’s reporting intermittent failures for the last half hour that certainly could cause global issues for many of the websites and apps we like to use.

Cloudflare, 3:02PM ET:

We are seeing a number of services suffer intermittent failures. We are continuing to investigate this and we will update this list as we assess the impact on a per-service level.

We’ve reached out to both Google and Cloudflare, and will update this article with more information once we have it.

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