Today, a massive outage rippled across the internet, knocking out access to some of the world’s most used platforms. The root cause? A serious disruption within Google Cloud’s infrastructure, which triggered a chain reaction that impacted Cloudflare and countless dependent apps and services.
🚨 What Happened?
At around 10:58 a.m. PDT / 1:58 p.m. EDT, Google Cloud began experiencing service-wide issues. By 11:46 a.m. PDT, reports began piling in across the tech world that everything from messaging apps to AI platforms had gone dark.
🧩 Key Points:
Google Cloud suffered outages in services like:
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Meet)
- BigQuery, Firestore, Vertex AI, and more
Cloudflare, which relies on Google Cloud for some internal services, also reported disruptions to:
- Authentication
- WARP client
- Access and Workers
Despite the impact, Cloudflare’s core edge network remained stable.
📉 Who Was Affected?
A huge range of platforms and services experienced outages, with DownDetector showing major spikes in user-reported issues:
| Service | Peak Reports |
|---|---|
| Spotify | 44,000+ |
| Discord | 11,000+ |
| Google Meet/Search | 4,000+ |
| Others | Snapchat, Twitch, Shopify, Character.AI, Replit, Cursor, Anthropic, and more |
Replit’s CEO confirmed on X (Twitter) that their downtime was caused by the Google Cloud outage and that their team was working directly with Google to bring things back online.
🛠️ Recovery Efforts
As of 12:12 p.m. PDT, Cloudflare reported recovery was underway. Google Cloud also stated that partial restoration was in progress, though some U.S. central regions (notably us-central1) continued to face IAM issues that affected a broad swath of services.
Status dashboards across both platforms show that services are gradually returning to normal, but some may still face intermittent disruptions.
🧠 Why This Matters
This incident underscores the interconnected fragility of modern cloud infrastructure:
- A single cloud provider outage can take down dozens of downstream applications and services.
- Even global companies with massive engineering teams remain vulnerable if they lack multi-region or multi-cloud failover strategies.
✅ What Should You Do?
If you’re a developer, business owner, or IT manager:
- Monitor status pages: Google Cloud, Cloudflare
- Communicate proactively: Let your users or customers know the issue is external and being addressed.
- Review your disaster recovery plan: Consider whether your apps rely too heavily on a single cloud region or provider.
- Reassess single points of failure: IAM and DNS systems should be designed with backup pathways.
🔮 What’s Next?
We expect a detailed post-mortem from Google Cloud in the coming days. It will likely highlight the root cause within their IAM system, recovery timelines, and what they’ll change to prevent a recurrence.
For now, services are mostly stabilizing, but today’s events are a clear reminder: even the most reliable cloud platforms can—and do—fail.
🧵 Stay tuned for updates. If your services are still down, check official status dashboards or social media for the latest.
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