Google Cloud down: The GCP outages explained

UPDATE: June 12, 2025, 7:30 p.m. ET A representative with hosting platform Cloudflare claimed that the disruptions to its services were the result of "a Google Cloud outage." Google did not respond to a request for comment.

UPDATE: June 12, 2025, 5:33 p.m. ET The Google Cloud service page has posted another update saying, "most of the Google Cloud products have confirmed full service recovery."

UPDATE: June 12, 2025, 5:12 p.m. ET The Google Cloud service page says engineers "have implemented mitigation for the issue" and are "seeing signs of recovery" in multiple regions. The status update says Google Cloud expects the recovery to complete in "less than an hour."

Today, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) reported disruptions to its services across the globe, while users reported problems accessing Google services such as Google Meet. So far, Google has not provided an explanation for the GCP outages.

And if you noticed some of your favorite sites and apps also stopped working this afternoon, you're not alone. It seems like practically the entire internet went down, including Google Cloud, OpenAI, Twitch, Discord, Nintendo, and Spotify.

Down Detector, a platform where users can report errors and other problems, showed a widespread spike in problems starting around 2 p.m. ET. (Disclosure: Down Detector is owned by Mashable's parent company, Ziff Davis.) And on social media platforms like X, users also shared their frustration.

What happened to Google Cloud?

On the Google Cloud status page, the service admitted to "service issues" at 2:46 p.m. ET. According to updates at 3:41 p.m. ET and 4:16 p.m. ET, engineers “have identified the root cause and have applied appropriate mitigations.” However, the company also noted that they didn't have an ETA for full recovery.

Meanwhile, a Google Cloud representative told Mashable, "We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services."

The Google Cloud status page states that affected areas include regions all across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America.

What is Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is a popular cloud hosting service. Because it provides hosting for a variety of other services, websites, and apps, a GCP outage could cause major ripple effects across the digital ecosystem.

What Google services were affected?

At the same time as the GCP outages, a variety of Google services were also experiencing problems, according to Down Detector. Users reported problems with Google Meet, Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Maps.

Users reported errors on a variety of websites Thursday afternoon. Credit: Courtesy of Down Detector

What was the cause of the Google Cloud outage?

At this time, we don't know the cause of the Google Cloud issues or the more widespread problems reported across the web.

An update posted to the Google Cloud status page at 4:16 p.m. ET stated: "We have identified the root cause and applied appropriate mitigations. Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1. Google Cloud products that rely on the affected infrastructure are seeing recovery in multiple locations. Our engineers are aware of the customers still experiencing issues on us-central1 and multi-region/us and are actively working on full recovery."

This story is developing and we'll update it with more information...