Services at Google Cloud have been restored after a three hour global outage on Thursday evening that rippled across multiple internal and external services.
Google Cloud’s status webpage confirmed that the global outage that taken place between 18:49 BST and 21:49 BST on Thursday 12 June 2025.
However the global outage has now been resolved, after it impacted multiple Google services including Chat, Gmail, Google Drive, Google and Docs, as well as external services such as Spotify, Snapchat and Discord.
Global outage
“We are deeply sorry for the impact to all of our users and their customers that this service disruption/outage caused,” said the firm. “Businesses large and small trust Google Cloud with your workloads and we will do better. In the coming days, we will publish a full incident report of the root cause, detailed timeline and robust remediation steps we will be taking.”
The outage is notable as it was global, affecting regions from Johannesburg in South Africa, Asia, Taiwan, South Korea, India, Australia, Finland, Italy, Germany, Canada, and the United States.
The United Kingdom and France were not mentioned in the status page as being impacted by the outage.
So what went wrong?
Well according to Google, “multiple Google Cloud and Google Workspace products experienced increased 503 errors in external API requests, impacting customers.”
“From our initial analysis, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected,” Google stated.
“To recover we bypassed the offending quota check, which allowed recovery in most regions within 2 hours,” it added. “ However, the quota policy database in us-central1 became overloaded, resulting in much longer recovery in that region. Several products had moderate residual impact (e.g. backlogs) for up to an hour after the primary issue was mitigated and a small number recovering after that.”
Google promised it will complete a full Incident Report in the following days that will provide a detailed root cause of the global outage
Cloud ambitions
The outage will cause red faces at Google Cloud, as it seeks to compete with the two leading cloud providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Despite being the third largest cloud provider in the world, Google Cloud has become the fastest growing part of Alphabet, but the tech giant still makes the bulk of its money from its ubiquitous search engine.
Google Cloud’s revenue last year totalled $43.2 billion, a 31 percent increase from 2023.
Previous outages
Google, like other tech firms offering online services, has experienced outages in previous years.
In February 2009 a two hour blackout of Google Mail was blamed on a data centre overload.
In 2015 Google admitted that four successive lightning strikes that affected a data centre in Belgium were the cause of the four-day cloud outage.
In April 2016 Google Cloud went offline in all regions for 18 minutes.
In September 2020 thousands of Google Drive users across the United States were unable to access the cloud storage platform for a number of hours.
In December 2020 a Google authentication failure knocked out broad array of services across the world, including Google Cloud, Google Suite, YouTube, Nest and Google Home.
In March 2021 a fire at a major fire in a SBG2 data centre located in Strasbourg (France) owned by French cloud service provider OVH, caused widespread access problems for Russians trying to access YouTube, Google and other servers.
In July 2022 a Google data centre in London suffered an outage, on what had been the hottest day in the United Kingdom, when temperatures had reached as high at 40.3 Celsius.
