On Thursday, June 12, 2025, a massive outage originating from Google Cloud disrupted numerous popular internet services worldwide, leaving millions of users grappling with interrupted access to platforms they rely on daily. The ripple effects of this outage were felt across a broad spectrum of digital services, from music streaming and instant messaging to cloud hosting and AI applications.
The disruption began in the late morning Pacific Time, with Google Cloud's status page reporting issues starting at 10:51 a.m. PT. The problem swiftly escalated, affecting multiple Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products and triggering widespread service interruptions. By early afternoon, tens of thousands of users reported difficulties accessing services such as Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI, as well as AI coding tools like Cursor and Replit, according to crowdsourced outage tracker Downdetector.
Cloudflare, a major web security and content delivery network provider, also experienced service disruptions. Although the core Cloudflare services remained operational, a limited number of their services relying on Google Cloud were impacted. A Cloudflare spokesperson clarified in communications with multiple outlets that this was unequivocally a "Google Cloud outage," stating, "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." This statement helped dispel any confusion about the source of the outage, as some users initially speculated Cloudflare itself was at fault.
Google Cloud engineers began investigating the issue at 11:46 a.m. PT, working to identify the root cause and mitigate the problem. By 2:23 p.m. PT, Google Cloud announced that mitigations had been implemented and expressed optimism that services would be restored within the hour. However, they cautioned that some customers were still experiencing varying degrees of impact, particularly in the us-central1 region, and no definitive timeline for full recovery was available at that time.
The outage affected a wide range of Google services beyond the cloud platform, including Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, and Google Voice. Spotify, one of the most visibly impacted platforms, saw outage reports peak at around 46,000 in the U.S., while Discord reported nearly 11,000 incidents. These numbers gradually decreased as services began to recover by late afternoon and evening.
Other notable services affected included Amazon’s Twitch, CoreWeave’s Weights and Biases, Elastic, GitLab, LangChain, Microsoft’s GitHub, Replit, and Intuit’s Mailchimp. E-commerce software vendor Shopify, a significant Google Cloud customer, acknowledged the issue on social media, noting that several of its services were impacted. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, also reported login issues related to single sign-on and other authentication methods, with their engineering teams actively working to resolve the problems.
The scale and scope of the outage underscored the critical role Google Cloud plays in the internet ecosystem. Google Cloud has been Alphabet’s fastest-growing business segment, with revenues reaching $43.2 billion in 2024, a 31% increase from the previous year. This growth has been fueled by the surging demand for cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence services. Despite this, the outage represented a significant setback, highlighting the challenges of maintaining reliability at such a vast scale.
Historically, Google Cloud has experienced outages before. A notable incident in January 2022 lasted approximately three and a half hours in the us-west1-b region, caused by routine maintenance that inadvertently triggered a firmware race condition affecting network switches. While the precise cause of the June 2025 outage has yet to be fully disclosed, Google indicated that a detailed analysis would be published following their internal investigation.
By Thursday evening, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, took to social media platform X to announce full service restoration across all regions and products. "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." This message marked the end of a roughly six-hour disruption that challenged some of the most widely used online platforms.
The outage also had financial repercussions. Cloudflare’s stock price fell by 5% on the day, reflecting investor concerns about the impact of such service interruptions. However, other major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure reported no disruptions during this period, underscoring the competitive landscape in cloud infrastructure services.
For users, the outage was a stark reminder of the internet’s fragility and the extent to which daily digital life depends on a handful of cloud providers. As one Google Cloud spokesperson told TechCrunch, "We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services," underscoring the company’s commitment to transparency and resolution.
In the aftermath, many are left wondering about the resilience of cloud infrastructure and what steps Google and others might take to prevent such widespread outages in the future. For now, the focus remains on recovery and ensuring that the millions affected can return to their digital routines without further interruption.
