A major internet outage on Thursday, June 12, disrupted services across several popular platforms, including Google Cloud, Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, and more. The disruption began shortly before 2 p.m. ET and affected users across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world.
According to Downdetector, a real-time outage tracking service, thousands of users reported issues with multiple apps and websites, with the most significant impact seen on Google Cloud services. At its peak, over 14,000 users experienced problems with Google Cloud. Other affected services included Spotify (46,000+ reports), Discord (11,000+ reports), Etsy, UPS, Character.ai, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), although AWS later confirmed its systems were operating normally.
Google Cloud’s status page confirmed outages in at least 13 of its services. “We are experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products,” the company noted, adding that its engineering team was actively investigating the root cause of the disruption.
A Google spokesperson echoed this statement, telling USA TODAY, “We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services.”
Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure provider, also acknowledged being impacted by the Google Cloud outage. In a statement to CNN, a Cloudflare representative said, “This is a Google Cloud outage. A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted.” The company clarified that its core systems remained unaffected but confirmed downtime for services like Cloudflare Workers KV, a cloud-based data storage tool.
Snapchat addressed the issue via its official X handle, saying, “We’re aware that some Snapchatters are having issues hang tight, we’re looking into it!”
By late afternoon, many services had begun recovering. Cloudflare noted improvements on its service status dashboard, while issue reports for Google Cloud and Discord began to decline on Downdetector.
Google Cloud is one of the largest internet infrastructure providers, reportedly handling around 25% of the world’s internet traffic as of 2018. While not as dominant as AWS or Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud holds 12% of the global market share, according to Synergy Research Group.
This latest outage highlights the internet’s heavy dependence on a few cloud infrastructure giants. Similar disruptions in recent years such as the AWS outage in 2021 and a Cloudflare incident in 2020 have caused ripple effects across the digital ecosystem.
This is a developing story
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