- A widespread outage of high-profile internet services occurred on Thursday
- Google Cloud Platform appeared to be one of the most heavily impacted
- The cause of the outage isn't yet clear
UPDATE 06/13/2025 9:37 am ET: Google Cloud said in an update late Thursday night that all services had recovered and attributed the incident to "an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected." The company added "This incident should not have happened, and we will take the following measures to prevent future recurrence:
- Prevent our API management platform from failing due to invalid or corrupt data.
- Prevent metadata from propagating globally without appropriate protection, testing and monitoring in place.
- Improve system error handling and comprehensive testing for handling of invalid data."
The original story follows.
If you happened to check Downdetector around 3 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, you’d be forgiven for thinking the sky was falling.
That’s because a LOT of key internet services appeared to be facing issues – think everything from Spotify, Discord, Snapchat and Cloudflare to Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure. Even the big three U.S. mobile operators made the list. So, we went digging.
Google Cloud’s health dashboard showed dozens of services were impacted, everything from the cloud giant’s API gateway, Agent Assist and Cloud Spanner to Google Cloud Storage, Google Compute Engine and Vertex AI search. The impacts were felt in dozens of regions across the globe.
A Google Cloud representative said it was investigating the outage and referred Fierce to its health dashboard for updates.
“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. All the respective engineering teams are actively engaged and working on service recovery,” a note on the dashboard read. “We do not have an ETA for full service recovery.”
Things over on the AWS and Microsoft Azure service dashboards looked much calmer, despite both displaying spikes in reported outages on Downdetector. An AWS representative told Fierce "We are operating normally," adding that reports to the contrary were not accurate.
Cloudflare, which was among the impacted services, said in a statement its service issues were related to the Google Cloud outage.
“A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly,” a company representative told Fierce. “The core Cloudflare services were not impacted.”
Verizon similarly told Fierce "We are aware of a third party outage impacting traffic on some internet platforms. There are no issues with Verizon's network related to this outage." An AT&T spokesperson also told Fierce its network was operating normally.
This story was last updated 06/13/2025 at 9:37 am ET.