Widespread disruption hits Gmail, Maps, Character.ai, and more as Google Cloud suffers technical failure; full recovery achieved in most regions.
June 13, 2025 | New Delhi —
A major internet outage on Thursday disrupted several leading digital platforms across the globe after Google Cloud, the infrastructure backbone for numerous apps and services, experienced a significant technical issue. Among the platforms affected were Google services (Gmail, Search, Maps), as well as Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, and Character.ai, with users reporting widespread downtimes.
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According to Google Cloud’s official status page, engineers identified the root cause by 12:41 PM PT and began implementing mitigation strategies. By 6:18 PM PDT, the company confirmed that services had fully recovered, except for some delays reported in the us-central1 region.
“Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1. Vertex AI Online Prediction has now fully recovered. All affected services are operating normally,” Google stated.
Global Platforms Affected
Several major third-party apps and gaming services that rely on Google Cloud’s backend infrastructure also experienced interruptions. These included:
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- Character.ai
- Pokemon Trading Card Game Online
- Spotify and Snapchat
- Google Nest and Google Maps
Cloudflare Confirms Google Issue
While speculation initially pointed to broader infrastructure problems, Cloudflare clarified in a statement to CNN that its core services remained unaffected. Only a limited subset of services using Google Cloud were impacted.
“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,” the Cloudflare representative said.
Downdetector Reports Thousands of Complaints
Monitoring service Downdetector registered over 11,000 issue reports from India, and more than 10,000 in the US, related to Google Cloud services. These numbers are compiled from real-time user reports and may underrepresent or overestimate the actual scale of the disruption.
Google to Publish Post-Mortem
Google has promised a detailed incident analysis following its internal review, aiming to explain the outage’s root causes and preventive steps going forward.
In a final statement, the company thanked users for their patience and reassured them that all systems were operating normally again.
Tags:
Google Cloud, Internet Outage, Spotify, Snapchat, Gmail Down, Cloudflare, Google Services, Downdetector, Character.ai, Global Outage