Global internet infrastructure faced a major disruption on June 12 as both Google Cloud and Cloudflare experienced widespread outages, impacting multiple services across regions.
The outage began around 10:51 AM PDT and quickly triggered waves of issues across key platforms. Cloudflare, a critical internet security and performance provider, initially reported failures in Access authentication and WARP connectivity under its Zero Trust suite.
Cloudflare clarified in a status update that the problem stemmed from an outage at Google Cloud, which hosts some of its services.
“This is a Google Cloud outage. A limited number of Cloudflare services were affected, but our core infrastructure remained stable,” said a company spokesperson.
By 15:29 EDT, Google had acknowledged the issue was affecting multiple Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services—including Bigtable, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, Vertex AI, Memorystore, Identity Platform, and more. Workspace applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar, and Chat were also affected.
Google reported it had identified the root cause and began applying mitigations. Most global regions saw infrastructure recovery except us-central1, which remained under active resolution.
“Google Cloud products that rely on the affected infrastructure are seeing recovery in multiple locations,” the company noted.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare’s latest updates at 17:41 EDT confirmed that all affected services—including WARP, Turnstile, Workers KV, and AI Gateway—had recovered and were fully operational.
“Cloudflare services are recovering quickly around the globe… a small residual impact remains, and we’re working to eliminate it,” the company wrote on its status page.
In parallel, Google stated that certain services like Google Lens, Discover, and Voice Search continued to show degraded performance and would be addressed in future updates.
Outage tracking platform Downdetector saw tens of thousands of reports as issues unfolded, with users reporting failures not only in Google and Cloudflare services but also platforms like Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, NPM, and Firebase Studio.
While those additional outages may not be directly related, the incident once again highlights the fragility of the internet’s backbone—especially when major cloud service providers experience cascading failures.
This large-scale disruption sparked conversations around cloud dependency, redundancy, and the importance of multi-cloud strategies for businesses operating online.
