Google Cloud Outages: Widespread Digital Platforms Left Offline Amid Global Disruption

A major outage linked to Google Cloud services brought down or severely impacted numerous digital platforms, including popular apps like Gmail, Spotify, Snapchat, and Discord, on Sunday, June 12.

The widespread disruption affected thousands of users worldwide as they struggled to access their favorite services. Google's own services also took a hit, with issues reported for Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, and Nest.

According to reports, the problem was largely concentrated in the us-central1 zone, a key Google Cloud region supporting infrastructure for various digital services. Apps like Character.ai and the Pokémon Trading Card Game experienced performance issues due to their reliance on Google's backend.

By 6:18 PM PDT, Google confirmed that "all affected services are now operating normally," with some residual issues in the us-central1 region still present. However, this update brought relief to millions of users and businesses relying on Google Cloud infrastructure for daily operations.

In an effort to understand what went wrong and prevent similar incidents, Google has promised a full internal review and will publish a detailed post-mortem analysis once the investigation is complete.

Cloudflare's spokesperson added that the issue originated from Google Cloud itself, not within their network. Downdetector reported over 11,000 complaints related to issues with Google Cloud services, while the actual number of affected users may be significantly higher due to data limitations.

As the digital world has recovered, users and developers alike are eagerly awaiting Google's post-mortem report to understand what caused the outage and how similar incidents can be prevented in the future.