The internet went down on Thursday: Here's what we know now

We're getting a better picture of what happened on Thursday, when large swaths of the internet went down. And it's painting a picture of how fragile our internet ecosystem really is when key cogs malfunction.

One crucial fact to understand: Lots of commonly used sites and services rely on a few major hosting providers — and if something goes wrong, the downstream effects can prove substantial. As the outage event unfolded Thursday, early speculation centered around problems with two popular hosting platforms Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Cloudflare.

Any major problems with providers like this will result in lots of your favorite online sites and apps going down. Down Detector on Thursday saw user-reported issues at Twitch, Gmail, Discord, Nintendo Switch Online, Spotify, and dozens more platforms. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis owns both Mashable and Down Detector.)

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It's too soon to fully declare what caused such widespread issues. The internet we take for granted every day is complex. But a representative from Cloudflare did blame Google Cloud for its issues as the outages persisted on Thursday. And in a company blog post, it pointed to a "third-party vendor" as the source of errors.

"This is a Google Cloud outage," the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Mashable. "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."

An initial incident report from Google Cloud noted it had issues with its API management system. The company reported the issues had been fully resolved about three hours after they began.

"In the coming days, we will publish a full incident report of the root cause, detailed timeline and robust remediation steps we will be taking," the company wrote on its GCP status page.

And Google Cloud's CEO, Thomas Kurian, did apologize for the issues in a post on X.

"We have been hard at work on the outage today and we are now fully restored across all regions and products," Kurian wrote. "We regret the disruption this caused our customers."

Cloudflare also apologized for the outage even as it laid ultimate blame elsewhere.

"We’re deeply sorry for this outage: this was a failure on our part, and while the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them," it wrote in a blog post.

Whatever the root cause, people across the globe once again had full access to the internet on Friday — after a bit of widespread panic the day prior.