A massive internet outage has hit the US, knocking dozens of popular websites offline.

According to Downdetector, Google, YouTube, Etsy, Spotify and many others went down around 1pm ET.

While thousands of Americans issued reports to Downdetector, the outage seems to be plaguing all parts of the globe. 

Users in the UK, parts of Europe, Canada and Asia are also having trouble accessing certain websites.

The internet glitch seems to be caused by technical problems at Google Cloud, which runs much of the internet's behind-the-scenes infrastructure.

'Multiple [Google Cloud Platform] products are experiencing impact due to Identity and Access Management Service Issue,' Google's website reads.

'Our engineers are continuing to mitigate the issue and we have confirmation that the issue is recovered in some locations. We do not have an ETA on full mitigation at this point.'

Cloudflare, a popular IT management company that provides hosting services, also said that it was having problems with Access logins and its Zero Trust WARP connection. 

'Anyone know why pretty much the entire internet is down right now??? AWS, Google Cloud, Azure... all the cloud providers are down,' one user shared on X.

Another user posted: 'How can Google Cloud, AWS, and Cloudflare all be down at the same time? 

'These companies manage nearly 90 percent of all internet activities and applications.'

Users have sited issues with apps, websites and service connection for the dozens that are down, according to Downdetector.

Amazon Web Services' status appears to be optimal, but the Cloudflare dashboard is still showing a 'broad' service outage. 

'We are starting to see services recover. We still expect to see intermittent errors across the impacted services as systems handle retried and caches are filled,' Cloudfare shared at 3:35pm ET. 

The company also said that 'a number of services are suffering intermittent failures' due to 'a third-party service that is a key dependency.'

'[I] didn’t realize how centralized the internet is around Cloudflare until it goes down,' an X user posted on the social media site.

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of the data analytics company Catchpoint, said: 'This outage impacts tens of thousands of users across a wide swath of applications. 

'It's a huge reminder that even hyperscalers like Google, AWS and Cloudflare are not immune to disruption. 

'Outages like this reinforce the need for proactive monitoring, resilient architecture, and transparent communication. Interdependent, external observability is no longer a nice-to-have; it's essential.'

Google Workplace services are also down, leaving users unable to access Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Docs, Meet, Task and Voice in the middle of a workday.