He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. On Thursday afternoon, many people with smart home setups connected to Google Home / Nest, or who are trying to stream music on Spotify, started coming up empty. The issues appear to be tied to problems with Google Cloud that affected server locations globally starting at about 1:51PM ET, and have now been largely resolved. Google’s first public update to its status page came well after a message from Replit CEO Amjad Masad at 2:34PM ET, when he tweeted, “Google cloud is having an outage and that’s taking Replit down. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted,” wrote Alexander Modiano in response to a question from The Verge.