New Delhi: For a few tense hours on June 12, some of the internet’s most popular platforms went dark. Google Cloud faced a major service disruption that spread across continents and brought services like Spotify, OpenAI, Shopify, and Discord to a halt. The issue triggered massive user reports globally, including hundreds from India, before the cloud giant restored operations.
Downdetector logged over 13,000 outage alerts, mainly from major U.S. cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The outage even hit Google’s own services, including App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud DNS, and Vertex AI Online Prediction. In India, users in cities like Mumbai and Delhi also reported glitches while trying to access services tied to Google Cloud.
Tech blackout: Google Cloud outage shows internet’s weak links
It wasn’t just Google’s internal systems that went down. Platforms that rely on Google Cloud, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Discord, Shopify, and Cloudflare, also reported performance issues. A Cloudflare spokesperson told BleepingComputer, “This is a Google Cloud outage. A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted.”
Cloudflare posted updates confirming that while core services were unaffected, some features like WARP and Turnstile faced minor disruptions. By late evening, the company said most systems had recovered, with “a small residual impact” being addressed.
Google first flagged the issue at 10:51 PDT and restored full service by 18:18 PDT. In a statement on its Cloud Status Dashboard, the company confirmed, “All the services are fully recovered from the service issue. We will publish analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation.”
The incident hit dozens of Google Cloud services used by developers and businesses globally. These included Google Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Apigee, Dialogflow, Vertex Gemini API, and Looker Studio, to name a few.
This is not the first time a cloud provider outage has disrupted digital life at scale. Nearly a year ago, a flawed software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered widespread outages in systems running specific versions of Microsoft Windows, impacting hospitals, airlines, and payment systems worldwide.
Google Cloud, which earned $43.2 billion last year, a 31 percent jump from 2023, now joins the growing list of providers who’ve suffered multi-service outages in recent months. The impact of this outage shows how deeply embedded cloud infrastructure is in everything from work apps to music streaming.
Google has promised a detailed breakdown soon.
