Internet down? Global internet outage affects Gmail, Snapchat, Spotify, Discord

It felt like the internet was down, as a major internet outage on Thursday, 12 June, temporarily disrupted access to numerous popular online services across the globe. The root cause has been attributed to a technical issue in Google Cloud’s infrastructure, which supports a large number of third-party platforms and enterprise services.

Starting around 2:30 pm ET (12:00 am IST on Friday), users began reporting widespread outages on platforms such as Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps, Discord, Spotify, Twitch, Snapchat, and Nintendo Switch Online, among others. The service disruptions prompted a spike in error reports on Down Detector and similar monitoring platforms, with over 11,000 reports from India and 10,000 from the United States alone.

Several Google services, including Vertex AI and Google Nest, were directly impacted. Third-party platforms relying on Google Cloud, such as Character.ai, Rocket League, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and Anthropic’s Claude, also experienced downtime. The outage affected other critical internet infrastructure providers like Cloudflare and Shopify, triggering cascading issues across many websites and apps.

Cloudflare, which provides content delivery and cybersecurity services for a large portion of the internet, reported "broad Cloudflare service outages" and noted that a “limited number of services” relying on Google Cloud were impacted. In an email to CNN, a Cloudflare spokesperson confirmed, “This is a Google Cloud outage. A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”

At 1:16 pm PT (1:46 am IST on Friday), Google Cloud engineers announced they had identified the root cause and implemented mitigation measures. Although most regions saw services gradually restored, Google acknowledged continued performance issues in its “us-central1” zone for some time.

By 6:50 pm ET, both Google and Cloudflare confirmed that the majority of issues had been resolved. Finally, at 9:27 pm ET (6:27am IST), Google Cloud posted its all-clear update: “All the services are fully recovered from the service issue.” A full analysis of the incident will be published following an internal investigation.

While the outage has now been resolved, the incident underscored the internet's heavy reliance on a few core infrastructure providers. Many users took to social media to vent their frustration, especially those affected during work hours, as tools like Google Meet and Gmail went down. Dozens of sites, including Shopify, DoorDash, Equifax, Gemini, Calendly, and even entertainment platforms like Marvel and MLB.tv, were listed among those impacted.

Google has since thanked users for their patience, promising further transparency once the investigation concludes.