Google Cloud’s final update this afternoon signaled the end to a series of disruptions that left a portion of the internet offline for hours. In a final status update, “Vertex AI Online Prediction is fully recovered as of 18:18 PDT. All the services are fully recovered from the service issue. We will publish analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation,” said Google Cloud. All major services restored for users worldwide, although the recovery took several hours and some regions continued to experience issues.
Earlier on Thursday morning in the United States, Google Cloud’s initial outage report stated, “We are experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products beginning on Thursday, 2025-06-12 10:51 PDT. Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue,” said Google Cloud. This announcement was followed by reports that outages began around 14:00 Eastern Time, with Downdetector recording over 11,000 outage reports. The outage left a portion of the internet offline for hours and affected users worldwide.
The interruption was not limited to Google’s own products. The outage affected third-party services as well as Google products such as YouTube, Google Search, Google Meet, and Google Drive, leaving users without access. Third-party platforms reliant on Google infrastructure—including Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, the Pokémon digital card game, and the AI tool Character.ai—were also affected. Platforms such as Etsy, Shopify, UPS, and Roblox experienced disruptions. Network services encountered issues; one statement noted, “There was no outage in our own systems,” said Cloudflare, while another report mentioned that network services providing infrastructure to many websites also experienced issues.
Around 16:00 Eastern Time, Google announced that it had identified the problem and applied a solution. A subsequent status report noted, “We have identified the root cause and applied appropriate mitigations. Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1,” said Google Cloud. Despite these improvements, some regions could not access Google and third-party services because technologies essential to these companies had been disabled during the rectification process.
The Google Cloud team worked to fix the issues that disrupted most internet services. One hour later, an update stated, “Our engineers are continuing to mitigate the issue and we have confirmation that the issue is recovered in some locations,” said Google Cloud. Although the situation improved following the outage, Google encountered further system issues that delayed full restoration, and the company indicated that some disruptions might have persisted without specifying a timeline for normal service.
Public reaction to the outage was immediate. On Friday morning, Downdetector received 1,000 outage reports from India, and on social media the outage became a trending topic. One user on the X platform remarked, “Why did Spotify crash while I was at the gym? What am I going to do now?” Many people expressed frustration, especially those beginning their workday when the outage struck.
Google cited errors in its services as the cause of the outage, with interruptions confirmed in all regions. Although no additional details were provided regarding the exact cause beyond the statements “the root cause has been identified” and “the necessary corrections have been applied,” the impact was evident. The company closed its announcements with an apology, stating, “We apologize to everyone affected by the outage,” said Google Cloud.