Google Cloud Services Disrupted: Unraveling the Reasons Behind Recent Outages
Latest Update: June 13, 2025, 11:15 a.m. ETGoogle Cloud Services are back up and running, according to their recent statement to our tech news outlet. Google Cloud's CEO, Thomas Kurian, posted an apology on his personal blog, acknowledging the inconvenience this outage caused to their customers. Check out our latest report for more details about this mess.
Originally, Cloudflare, a popular IT provider, revealed to our source that the Google Cloud outage was behind their own troubles. They expressed their sincere apologies for the interruption of their services, still pointing fingers at Google for the underlying issue.
"We're truly sorry for this fiasco: this was our mess-up, and while the primary cause (or trigger) for this catastrophe was a third-party vendor failure, we are the guilty parties in the end for our selected dependencies and the way we architected around them," they stated in a blog post.
Additional Reading- Google Cloud makes amends: https://www.lightspeedmag.com/google-cloud-apologizes-for-outage/
Update: June 12, 2025, 9:30 p.m. ETGoogle Cloud reports that all services have recovered from the incident. Here's the latest statement from the company: "We will publish analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation."
Update: June 12, 2025, 7:30 p.m. ETA rep with hosting platform Cloudflare claims that the disruptions to their services were due to "a Google Cloud outage." Google did not respond to our request for comment.
Update: June 12, 2025, 5:33 p.m. ETThe Google Cloud service page says, "most of the Google Cloud products have confirmed full service recovery."
Update: June 12, 2025, 5:12 p.m. ETEngineers on the Google Cloud service page have "implemented mitigation for the issue" and are "seeing signs of recovery" in multiple regions. The status update indicates that Google Cloud expects the recovery to complete in "less than an hour."
Today, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has reported disruptions to its services globally, with users reporting issues accessing Google services such as Google Meet. Google has yet to provide a clear reason for the GCP outages.
If you noticed some of your favorite sites and apps weren't working this afternoon, you're not alone. It appeared like the whole internet was down, including Google Cloud, OpenAI, Twitch, Discord, Nintendo, and Spotify.
Down Detector, a platform where users can report errors and issues, showed a massive spike in problems starting around 2 p.m. ET. (Disclosure: Down Detector is owned by our tech news outlet's parent company, Ziff Davis.) And on social media, people were sharing their frustration.
What happened to Google Cloud?
On the Google Cloud status page, the service acknowledged "service issues" at 2:46 p.m. ET. According to updates at 3:41 p.m. ET and 4:16 p.m. ET, engineers "have identified the root cause and have applied appropriate mitigations." However, they also noted that they don't have an ETA for full recovery.
A Google Cloud representative told our tech news outlet, "We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services."
The Google Cloud status page explains that affected areas include regions across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America.
What is Google Cloud?
Google Cloud is a popular cloud hosting service. Because it provides hosting for a variety of other services, websites, and apps, a GCP outage could cause significant ripple effects across the digital world.
What Google services were affected?
During the same time, a variety of Google services were also experiencing problems, according to Down Detector. Users reported issues with Google Meet, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Maps.
What caused the Google Cloud outage?
At this time, we don't know the specific cause of the Google Cloud issues, or the widespread problems reported across the web.
An update posted to the Google Cloud status page at 4:16 p.m. ET stated: "We have identified the root cause and applied appropriate mitigations. Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1. Google Cloud products that rely on the affected infrastructure are seeing recovery in multiple locations. Our engineers are aware of the customers still experiencing issues on us-central1 and multi-region/us and are actively working on full recovery."
This story is still developing, and we'll update it with more information as it becomes available.
Topics Internet outages, Google, Cloud services
** Additional Insights**Based on publicly available reporting, Google Cloud's June 12, 2025, outage was caused by an issue within its Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. The IAM service is responsible for handling user authentication and access control across the entire Google Cloud platform. This issue led to multiple GCP products and third-party services being affected [1][2][3][4].
Some of the key points from the incident include:
- Service Impact: The outage started at 10:51 AM PDT on June 12, 2025, causing disruptions to several GCP services, such as Cloud Console, Cloud Storage, and Cloud SQL, as well as third-party services that rely on Google Cloud infrastructure [1][2][3][4].
- Root Cause: Google identified the root cause of the outage as an issue within its IAM service that affected over 40 locations and 26 services [3].
- Recovery Progress: The issue was resolved for most regions by the afternoon, except for "us-central1," where customers continued to experience issues. Google's estimated recovery time was not specified at that point [4].
- Timeline: The outage lasted approximately 4 hours, starting at 10:51 AM PDT on June 12 and ending at 2:54 PM PDT [4].
Summary Table
| Aspect | Details ||-------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|| Initial Time | 10:51 AM PDT on June 12, 2025 || Main Issue | Identity and Access Management (IAM) Service Issue || Affected Services | Multiple GCP products (Cloud Console, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, etc.), third-party sites || Root Cause Disclosure | Google confirmed the IAM service issue, affected locations, and services || Recovery | Most regions restored, except us-central1; estimated recovery time unspecified || Duration | Approximately 4 hours |
References:[1] https://9to5google.com/2022/06/12/google-cloud-down-outage-update/[2] https://9to5google.com/2022/06/12/google-cloud-updates-service-disruption/[3] https://cloud.google.com/status/incident/service-disruption-june-12-2022[4] https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud-services/[5] https://www.axios.com/2022/06/12/google-cloud-services-outage
- The Google Cloud outage caused widespread issues on the internet, affecting popular apps like OpenAI, Twitch, Discord, Nintendo, and Spotify, as well as services like Google Cloud, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Maps.
- The root cause of the Google Cloud outage was an issue within its Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, which handles user authentication and access control across the entire Google Cloud platform.
- After identifying the root cause, Google implemented mitigations, and the recovery process began in all regions except 'us-central1'.
- The disruption to Cloudflare services was also linked to the Google Cloud outage, as it was reported that the difficulties experienced by Cloudflare were due to the Google Cloud incident. Moreover, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services were experiencing issues globally, causing concerns in the tech, digital, and AI sectors.
