Google Cloud, AWS, And Cloudflare Hit By Outage, Google Says Issue Resolved

From popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools blinking out to critical infrastructure going out, we’re often reminded of just how fragile the digital world really is.

First, OpenAI’s flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, went dark globally, taking down its API and even the video tool, Sora. Next, we're sure you remember the CrowdStrike update that took down Windows and caused global chaos. Then, a massive power outage left 10 million people across Portugal and Spain in the dark.

Just as things started to settle, Google Cloud’s outage on Thursday sent shockwaves, disrupting everything from Gmail and Google Meet to Spotify, Discord, and more.

One thing’s clear: the systems we depend on daily aren’t as unbreakable as we think.

Let’s see what exactly unfolded.
 

Google Cloud, AWS, And Cloudflare Suffer Major Outages

Much of the internet service was disrupted on Thursday, June 12, after major cloud providers Google Cloud and Cloudflare went down simultaneously.

Google Cloud acknowledged the problem at 11:46 AM PT and began investigating the disruption, with early reports suggesting that it was behind the widespread online outage.


While initial indications focused solely on Google Cloud, social media was abuzz with reports suggesting that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare were also down.

Cloudflare suffered a "significant service outage that affected a large set of our critical services, including Workers KV, WARP, Access, Gateway, Images, Stream, Workers AI, Turnstile and Challenges, AutoRAG, Zaraz, and parts of the Cloudflare Dashboard."

By 12:12 PM PT, Cloudflare started seeing its services recover, and Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park linked the disruption to the Google Cloud outage, saying, “This is a Google Cloud outage. 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.”
 

Cloudflare Responds With Apology And Fixes

Cloudflare expressed deep regret for the incident, stating, "We’re deeply sorry for this outage: this was a failure on our part, and 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."

Cloudflare detailed immediate fixes and long-term steps to boost resilience, including speeding up improvements to redundancy in its Workers KV storage system, reducing reliance on single providers, strengthening recovery for key services, and adding tools to gradually restore namespaces during storage-related issues.


The disruption went beyond core infrastructure providers, though.

Thousands of users turned to crowdsourced platforms, such as DownDetector, to report that the outages had affected popular apps and services. The list includes Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI, along with AI coding tools like Cursor and Replit.

This led to concerns about the stability of the internet's backbone, as one software engineer posted on X, "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."
 
Google clarified that the problem was indeed global and stemmed from "Identity and Access Management Service Issues" affecting "Multiple GCP (Google Cloud Platform) products."

It was not, however, an internet problem in the traditional sense; there were no reports of issues with the Domain Name System (DNS) or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and internet traffic appeared to be flowing as usual.

So, how did Google respond to this significant outage?
 

Google Fixes Rollout, But Warns That Full Recovery Will Take Time

By 2:23 PM PT, Google Cloud said it had put fixes in place and expected services to recover within the hour. Spokesperson Devon Smiley confirmed, “We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services.”

At 3:41 p.m. ET, Google provided an update, confirming that its engineers had identified the root cause of the issue. However, a complete resolution was still in the works.

"While our engineers have confirmed that the underlying dependency is recovered in all locations except us-central1, we are aware that customers are still experiencing varying degrees of impact on individual Google Cloud products," Google stated.

"All the respective engineering teams are actively engaged and working on service recovery. We do not have an ETA for full service recovery,” Google added.

As the day progressed, the scope of the problem became clearer, affecting not just the U.S. but becoming a global issue.

At 5 PM ET, Google shared a positive update, saying, "We have implemented mitigation for the issue in us-central1 and multi-region/us and are seeing signs of recovery.”

"The issue with Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, Google Voice has been resolved for all affected users," Google confirmed in a statement.

We have received confirmation from our internal monitoring and customers that the Google Cloud products are also seeing recovery in multiple regions and are also seeing signs of some recovery in us-central1 and multi-region/us," said the tech giant.

While Google and Cloudflare acknowledged the outages and posted frequent updates on their resolution, AWS denied it had been affected.
 

AWS Denies Disruption Amid Speculation

AWS maintained throughout the downtime that its services were operating normally. An AWS spokesperson informed that AWS had not been experiencing any service disruptions, and the AWS Health Dashboard showed no issues.


The spokesperson emphasized, "Currently, there are no broad service issues with AWS. Our services are operating normally. The only resource on the internet that provides accurate data on the availability of our services is the AWS Health Dashboard."

As of now, Google has stated that its services have resumed, saying "The issue with Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, Google Voice has been resolved for all affected users."

While services were expected to come back online relatively shortly, Thursday’s outages were a sharp reminder of how connected yet vulnerable the internet is—and how issues for major cloud providers can snowball into global disruptions.

Do you think it is time to diversify our digital dependencies across Big Tech?

Let us know what you think in the comments section below!