On June 12, 2025, a significant internet outage impacted numerous online services, highlighting the interconnectedness and potential fragility of the modern web. The disruptions affected major platforms, including Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, and others, leaving users globally struggling to access their favorite applications and websites.
Google Cloud Outage Triggers Cascade of Issues
The outage appears to have originated within Google Cloud infrastructure. Reports indicate that starting around 2 PM Eastern time, Google Cloud experienced issues that rippled outwards, causing problems for both Google-owned services and third-party applications that rely on its cloud infrastructure. Services like Google Search, Meet, Nest, and Workspace (including Google Docs and Google Drive) were among those affected.
Down Detector, a website that tracks outage reports, showed significant spikes in user-reported issues for these services, with each peaking at over 10,000 reports. The scale of the disruption underscores the central role Google Cloud plays in the internet ecosystem.
Cloudflare Acknowledges Impact, Blames Third-Party Vendor
Cloudflare also experienced issues, with a spokesperson initially attributing their problems to the Google Cloud outage. In a later blog post, Cloudflare pointed to a “third-party vendor” as the ultimate source of the errors. According to Cloudflare, the outage lasted 2 hours and 28 minutes and impacted services like Workers KV, WARP, Access, Gateway, Images, Stream, Workers AI, Turnstile and Challenges, AutoRAG, and Zaraz. The underlying storage infrastructure used by Workers KV, which is critical for many Cloudflare products, experienced a failure. This infrastructure relies on a third-party cloud provider.
Domino Effect on Other Services
The Google Cloud and Cloudflare incidents had a domino effect, disrupting other popular services like Discord and Spotify. Spotify's issues were significant enough to warrant separate tracking. The global nature of the outage was evident from reports streaming in from around the world.
Resolution and Lingering Issues
Google acknowledged the issues and worked to implement a fix. While most services were restored within approximately three hours, Google Search and Google Nest experienced longer recovery times. As of the latest updates, Google Cloud is still showing some lingering issues, although most services are believed to be back to normal.
Lessons Learned
This widespread internet outage serves as a stark reminder of the reliance on a few key hosting providers and the potential for cascading failures when critical components malfunction. It also highlights the importance of robust infrastructure, redundancy, and proactive monitoring to mitigate the impact of future disruptions.
- Google Cloud: Experienced issues with its API management system.
- Cloudflare: Initially blamed Google Cloud, later pointed to a third-party vendor.
- Impacted Services: Google Search, Meet, Nest, Workspace, Discord, Spotify, and many others.
- Duration: Approximately three hours for most services.