Massive Internet Outage Disrupts Global Services on June 12, 2025

A widespread internet outage on Thursday, June 12, 2025, caused significant disruptions to popular online services worldwide, affecting millions of users. The outage, primarily linked to issues with Google Cloud services, impacted platforms such as Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, Gmail, Google Meet, and many others, highlighting the internet's reliance on a few key infrastructure providers.

Outage Begins Midday, Affects Major Platforms

The disruption began around 1:50 p.m. ET (10:50 a.m. PDT) on June 12, with reports of service interruptions spiking on Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages. By 2:46 p.m. ET, over 10,000 users reported issues with Google Cloud, while Spotify saw more than 44,000 outage reports. Other affected services included Character.ai, Rocket League, Pokémon Trading Card Game, and Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot. Google’s own Workspace suite, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Meet, also experienced significant downtime.

Cloudflare, a major provider of web security and content delivery services, reported "broad service outages" caused by a third-party dependency, later identified by a Cloudflare spokesperson as Google Cloud. The cascading effect disrupted numerous websites and applications reliant on these infrastructures.

Google Cloud at the Core of the Issue

Google acknowledged the outage on its Cloud status page, stating that multiple Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products began experiencing issues at 10:51 PDT. By 12:41 PDT, Google reported that its engineers had identified the root cause and were working to mitigate the problem, though recovery was slower in the us-central1 region (Iowa). By 9:30 p.m. ET, Google announced that the issue had been resolved for all affected services, including Google Chat, Gmail, Google Drive, and others.

A Cloudflare representative told CNN, “This is a Google Cloud outage,” emphasizing that only a limited number of Cloudflare services reliant on Google Cloud were impacted, while core Cloudflare services remained operational. Cloudflare’s status page noted that its critical Workers KV service went offline due to the third-party outage, with services beginning to recover by 12:12 PDT.

Recovery and Broader Implications

By late Thursday evening, most services had returned to normal, with Downdetector showing a sharp decline in outage reports. Spotify, one of the hardest-hit platforms, confirmed recovery in a community update, addressing issues with login, playback, and its support site. Anthropic reported that text-only requests to Claude.ai were functioning again, though some API issues persisted.

The incident underscored the internet’s dependence on a handful of cloud providers, with Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure dominating the market. Google holds a 12% share of the global cloud services market, trailing Microsoft (21%) and Amazon (30%), according to Synergy Research Group. The outage served as a reminder of the vulnerabilities inherent in centralized infrastructure, prompting discussions about the need for greater decentralization.

Looking Ahead

Google Cloud’s CEO, Thomas Kurian, issued a statement apologizing for the disruption: “We have been hard at work on the outage today and we are now fully restored across all regions and products. We regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

As the internet continues to recover, experts are calling for increased resilience in cloud infrastructure to prevent similar incidents. For now, users are relieved to have their favorite services back online, but the outage has sparked renewed conversations about the fragility of the modern internet.