On June 12, 2025, Alphabet’s Google Cloud experienced a significant global outage that disrupted services across numerous widely used platforms, including Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and OpenAI. According to Downdetector.com, the service disruption began at approximately 1:50 p.m. ET (11:20 PM IST) and saw over 14,700 reports of downtime from U.S. users by 2:32 p.m. ET. Google Cloud officially acknowledged the issue, worked on resolving it promptly, and later confirmed that normal operations had resumed for all affected users.

The impacted services included major Google Workspace tools such as Google Chat, Google Meet, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Cloud Search, Google Tasks, and Google Voice. Following the resolution, Google released a “mini incident report” explaining the issue and offered a formal apology to its users and customers. The company stated, “We are deeply sorry for the impact this service disruption/outage caused. Businesses large and small trust Google Cloud with your workloads, and we will do better.”

Google also promised to publish a comprehensive incident report in the coming days, including a detailed root cause analysis, full timeline, and the remediation steps they intend to implement. According to the Google Cloud Status Dashboard, the incident lasted for a total of three hours. The official timeline provided (in U.S. Pacific Time) was:

• Incident Start: June 12, 2025, 10:49 AM

• Mitigation for all regions except us-central1: 12:48 PM

• Incident End: 1:49 PM

• Total Duration: 3 hours

• Regions Affected: Global

In the mini incident report, Google revealed that the issue stemmed from an invalid automated quota update applied to its API management system. This erroneous update propagated globally and resulted in the rejection of external API requests, leading to widespread 503 server errors across multiple Google Cloud and Google Workspace products.

To resolve the issue, Google’s engineering team bypassed the faulty quota check, which enabled recovery in most regions within two hours. However, the us-central1 region encountered prolonged disruptions due to an overloaded quota policy database, delaying the recovery process in that zone. Even after mitigation, a few products continued to show residual effects—such as backlogs—for up to an hour, and a small number required slightly longer to stabilize.

In response to the incident, Google outlined a series of preventive measures to ensure such outages do not recur. These include:

• Preventing invalid or corrupt data from causing failures in the API management platform.

• Avoiding global propagation of metadata without rigorous protection, testing, and monitoring.

• Enhancing system error handling and implementing comprehensive testing protocols to manage and filter out invalid data.

This outage highlights the critical importance of cloud infrastructure reliability, especially as businesses worldwide increasingly depend on platforms like Google Cloud for essential operations. Google's transparent reporting and commitment to future improvements offer some reassurance, but the event underscores the challenges of maintaining seamless cloud services at a global scale.