Massive Google Cloud Outage Disrupts Businesses Worldwide—What Happened and How to Protect Your Data

Updated June 12 2025 – A major Google Cloud outage rippled across the internet on Thursday, knocking dozens of high-profile platforms offline and exposing how deeply businesses rely on Google’s infrastructure. Timetable of the disruption • 10:51 a.m. PDT (17:51 UTC) – Google’s status dashboard first flagged “service issues” across multiple Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products, including Compute Engine, Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage. • 1:50 p.m. ET – Downdetector spikes showed more than 14,700 U.S. user reports that “Google Cloud is down,” with parallel surges for Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, Etsy and Peloton, all of which host workloads on GCP. • 4:12 p.m. ET – Google engineers “implemented mitigation” and traffic began restoring globally, ending roughly 2 hours 22 minutes of full outage and 27 minutes of residual instability. What services were affected Real-time monitoring indicated packet loss across North America, Europe and parts of Asia. Enterprises reported: • Inability to spin up new Compute Engine virtual machines. • 5xx errors for REST APIs hosted on Cloud Run and Cloud Functions. • Delayed Pub/Sub message delivery disrupting supply-chain apps. • Timeouts in Cloud SQL leading to e-commerce checkout failures. Consumer apps dependent on GCP—Spotify streaming, Discord voice channels, Snapchat Stories and various gaming back-ends—showed log-in loops or total downtime. Cause and Google’s response Google attributed the incident to “network capacity exhaustion in an elevated traffic scenario” within its us-central1 region that cascaded to load balancers in other regions. The company rolled back a recent configuration change, re-allocated capacity and initiated a post-mortem to be published under its 5-day SLO window. Why this Google Cloud outage matters 1. Multi-cloud urgency: The event reignites debate on single-provider reliance. Analysts at Gartner note that 71 % of enterprises now target an active-active architecture across AWS, Azure and GCP, but only 28 % have actually executed failover playbooks. 2. Compliance risk: Financial-services firms using Google Cloud must demonstrate operational resilience under new U.S. and EU regulations requiring “severe-but-plausible” cloud outage drills. 3. Cost of downtime: For ad-supported streaming apps, two hours of lost impressions can erase an entire day’s profit. Early estimates peg global revenue impact at $180 million for the top 50 affected sites. What businesses should do next • Review the Google Cloud Incident #ow5i3PPK root-cause analysis when published and map findings to your own Terraform scripts and IAM policies. • Deploy Cloud Load Balancing with global external failover or configure cross-cloud traffic steering via DNS-based routing. • Test backup and restore of Cloud SQL replicas in another region at least quarterly. • Subscribe to Pub/Sub dead-letter topics and create alerts in Cloud Operations Suite to cut mean-time-to-detection. Looking ahead While Thursday’s Google Cloud outage is now resolved, congestion warnings linger on the status page for us-west2 and europe-west1. Customers should expect latency spikes during peak traffic tonight as deferred jobs backfill. Industry watchers predict that Google will unveil new “sovereign region partitions” and stricter change-management gates at its upcoming Cloud Next ’25 keynote in San Francisco. For real-time Google Cloud status updates, bookmark status.cloud.google.com and enable RSS notifications; proactive monitoring remains the best defense against the next GCP outage.