Google Cloud Outage Breaks the Internet: What Happened and Why It’s a Wake-Up Call
On June 12, 2025, Google Cloud suffered a major outage that affected several of the world’s most-used apps and services. Gmail, Google Drive, Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, Replit, and many more have either stopped working or slowed down drastically. If the internet felt broken that day, it kind of was.
Reason Behind the Outage
The issue started with a faulty quota configuration. Google pushed a routine update to its API management system. But this change caused permission errors in key services like IAM (Identity and Access Management), which is basically the backbone of access and security in Google Cloud. Without IAM, many systems simply cannot function.
So when that broke, everything from App Engine to BigQuery and Cloud SQL started failing. The problem affected systems globally, and the scary part? Even Google’s own internal tools went down, making recovery slower.
Services That Went Down
It was not just a Google-only issue. The outage hit several popular apps and platforms that rely on Google Cloud, including Spotify, Snapchat, Twitch, Replit, Discord, LangChain, and even parts of GitHub and Cloudflare.
Google services like Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Meet, and Docs were partially down or extremely slow. Some users also reported issues with Google Search and YouTube. This shows how deeply connected everything is. You might not use Google Cloud directly, but your favorite app probably does. The biggest concern is how a single misstep in one global config update was enough to cause this level of chaos. That is terrifying.
What Makes This Outage Scary
Google has one of the most advanced cloud platforms in the world. But even they got caught off guard because of automation. They pushed the update globally, and it backfired instantly. And because IAM was broken, many recovery tools also became useless. Some engineers could not access their dashboards or logs. Recovery took hours in some regions—especially in us-central1, which was hit the hardest.
This was not a small glitch. It exposed how fragile cloud infrastructure can be, even when it’s managed by the best in the business.
To be honest, this incident was not surprising, but it was still disappointing. Cloud providers talk a lot about redundancy and reliability, but they also rely too much on automation. And that’s where the cracks show. This outage reminded me that resilience is not a bonus; it is a requirement. You cannot fix this by just adding more servers. You need to build systems that expect failure and know how to isolate it.
Google will fix this. They will publish a full report and improve safeguards. But what about the businesses that lost money and users during those seven hours? What about developers who had production apps go down and had no idea why?
See: Is it Up or Down?
