A massive technical failure at Google Cloud sent shockwaves through the digital world on Thursday, June 12, leaving users stranded without access to their favourite platforms and essential services, according to a report by NDTV.
The cloud infrastructure collapse didn't just hit Google's own ecosystem — Gmail, Search, Maps, and Nest devices all went dark. Popular third-party applications that depend on Google's backbone, including music streaming giant Spotify, social media platform Snapchat, gaming hub Discord, AI chatbot Character.ai, and even the Pokémon Trading Card Game, found themselves caught in the digital crossfire.
Google's engineering teams scrambled to contain the damage, with the first acknowledgement coming at 12.41 pm PT on their Cloud status page. A follow-up update at 1.16 pm PT revealed that while the root cause had been identified and mitigation efforts were underway, the us-central1 region remained problematic with sluggish response times affecting users in that area.
The situation gradually stabilised throughout the day, with Google confirming at 18.18 PDT that Vertex AI Online Prediction had fully recovered and all affected services were back to normal operations. The tech giant has promised a comprehensive analysis once their internal investigation wraps up, while expressing gratitude to users who endured the digital drought.
The ripple effects extended beyond Google's direct services. Cloudflare, another major internet infrastructure provider, found itself explaining to CNN that while its core systems remained intact, several of its services that rely on Google Cloud were temporarily knocked offline. "This is a Google Cloud outage," a Cloudflare spokesperson clarified, anticipating a swift resolution.
The scale of the disruption became evident through Downdetector's user-reported data, which showed over 11,000 complaints in India and more than 10,000 in the United States (US) specifically related to Google Cloud issues. These figures likely represent just the tip of the iceberg, as the actual number of affected users could be significantly higher given the widespread reliance on Google's infrastructure across the digital landscape.
