When Google Cloud Paused the Internet
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which offers a wide range of cloud services for various applications worldwide, experienced downtime on Thursday, the company reported. In a status report, Google said that “multiple GCP products are experiencing service issues” across several locations worldwide. The incident began at 10:51 am (PT) on Thursday and was resolved hours later, at 6:18 pm (PT), which is 11:21 am IST and 6:48 am IST, respectively. Platforms such as Spotify, Replit, Discord, Claude, Snapchat, Twitch, Cloudflare, and other services that use the Google Cloud faced outages. Besides, many of Google’s products, like Google Meet, Drive, Chat, and Gmail, that rely on GCP were said to be affected. These products use Google Cloud’s infrastructure for services such as storage, computing, networking, data processing, and more. Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, said on X, “Google Cloud is having an outage and that’s taking Replit down.” Anthropic, the company that develops the Claude family of AI models, stated on a status page that it has identified several issues with its products due to the outage affecting GCP. The company also mentioned that image and file uploads via the API and the Claude web app were unavailable due to the GCP issue. 🚨🚨It looks like EVERYTHING is DOWNAmazon Web Services, Anthropic, AT&T, Box, Breezeline, Calendly, CharacterAI, Cloudflare, cursor, Dialpad, Discord, DoorDash, Dragon Ball, Embark Studios, Equifax, Etsy, FuboTV, Gmail, Google, Google Cloud, Google Drive, Google Gemini, Google… pic.twitter.com/Sw5ziwbCt8— Hackmanac (@H4ckmanac) June 12, 2025 GitHub, the code hosting platform that also provides AI-assisted programming capabilities with GitHub Copilot, said in an incident report that underlying AI models like Claude and Google Gemini were facing issues. “Copilot is experiencing degraded performance,” said GitHub. However, all of the above services were restored to normalcy after a few hours. Source: x.com/GeraDeluxer Cloudflare Got Hit Bad Cloudflare was one of the platforms most impacted by GCP’s outage. The company provides internet security services to some of the leading websites worldwide, with around 19.3 million websites using its services. “The outage lasted 2 hours and 28 minutes, and globally impacted all Cloudflare customers using the affected services,” said the company in a blog post. It added that the outage was due to a failure in an underlying storage infrastructure, a part of which runs on a third-party cloud provider. A spokesperson from Cloudflare told CNBC that its issue stemmed from Google’s Cloud services as well. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted,” said the spokesperson. The company’s stock also fell by 5% on Thursday. We let down our customers at @Cloudflare today. Our Workers KV service failed and the downstream products that rely on that service had outages of their own. We will publish a full postmortem soon.I know that these kinds of incidents have real and serious impact for teams…— Dane Knecht 🦭 (@dok2001) June 12, 2025 “While the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them,” said the company. Cloudflare’s Workers KV service—a distributed, serverless key-value store designed for use with Cloudflare’s Workers, the company’s serverless computing platform—was significantly affected. “Workers KV saw 90.22% of requests failing: any key-value pair not cached and that required to retrieve the value from Workers KV’s origin storage backends resulted in failed requests,” said the company. Several Cloudflare products, such as Access, Gateway, WARP client, and Dashboard, were also impacted. These products are a key part of the overall infrastructure that Cloudflare provides to its customers. For instance, Access is a service that users Workers KV to store application and policy configuration along with user identity information. During this incident, Cloudflare said, Access failed 100% of identity-based logins for all application types. The company claims that no data was lost as a result of the incident. How can Google Cloud, AWS, and Cloudflare all be down at the same time? These companies manage nearly 90% of all internet activities and applications. pic.twitter.com/a9bpAGvfTz— Sam Abdul (@SamAbdul_) June 12, 2025 No, AWS and Azure Did Not Go Down Several reports emerged that GCP’s counterparts, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s Web Services, also faced outages, based on information from Down Detector, a website that checks what websites are currently facing downtime. However, neither Microsoft nor AWS have officially confirmed this. Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer, said this is likely a misunderstanding of how DownDetector checks for outages. “It cannot differentiate between ‘Azure is having issues’ vs ‘some sites hosted on Azure are having issues’ (that can be the case due to, eg, CF (Cloudflare)),” said Orosz in a post on X. According to Tom’s Guide, an AWS spokesperson has confirmed that they are not experiencing any service disruptions and stated that “Down Detector does not accurately reflect AWS issues.” Overall, Thursday’s events were a stark reminder of how relying on a single cloud service provider can bring down some of the most popular apps on the internet. “We build all this powerful tech, then that one Google Cloud outage takes it all offline,” said a user on X. “Feels like the universe saying: ‘Take a break. Go outside. You’re not in control anyway’,” they added.
Platforms such as Spotify, Replit, Discord, Claude, Snapchat, Twitch, Cloudflare, and other services that use the Google Cloud faced outages.
Platforms such as Spotify, Replit, Discord, Claude, Snapchat, Twitch, Cloudflare, and other services that use the Google Cloud faced outages.
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["AI", "Anthropic", "Aim", "RAG", "AWS", "Azure", "GCP", "serverless", "R", "Go"]
Supreeth is an engineering graduate who is curious about the world of artificial intelligence and loves to write stories on how it is solving problems and shaping the future of humanity.