You may have noticed many of your favourite online services stopped working on Thursday — and you’re not alone. From music streaming to social apps and AI tools, a wide range of services went offline, all due to a major Google Cloud outage.
The incident began around 11:00 a.m. PT on June 12, when thousands of users across the U.S. suddenly lost access to platforms like Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, and Character.AI. Even AI-based developer tools such as Cursor and Replit were impacted.
Google Cloud confirmed the issue shortly after, stating at 11:46 a.m. PT that it had started investigating disruptions affecting its customers. According to spokesperson Devon Smiley, the company swiftly identified the problem and began rolling out a fix. By 2:23 p.m. PT, Google said it had applied initial mitigations and expected systems to return to normal “within the hour.”
Cloudflare and other services also affected
It wasn’t just Google’s tools feeling the strain. Cloudflare — a company that powers a large portion of the web’s infrastructure — was hit, though only some of its services rely on Google Cloud.
At 11:19 a.m. PT, Cloudflare posted a notice on its status page stating that it was investigating issues affecting its customers. By 12:12 p.m. PT, the company reported that recovery was beginning. Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park clarified that the disruption stemmed from Google Cloud and that core Cloudflare services remained operational.
Google cloud is having an outage and that’s taking Replit down. We’re working with them to bring it back up ASAP. https://t.co/4qCyCzlIJR
— Amjad Masad (@amasad) June 12, 2025
“A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted,” Park stated. “We expect them to come back shortly.”
Meanwhile, other major cloud providers appeared unaffected. An AWS spokesperson said that their systems were running smoothly, and Microsoft Azure had no reports of outages on its official channels.
Popular apps and users left in the dark
If you tried to play music on Spotify, chat with friends on Snapchat, or use a coding tool on Thursday afternoon, you probably encountered errors or complete outages. According to DownDetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions through user reports, thousands of people logged issues with major apps during the peak of the downtime.
Spotify spokesperson Shira Rimini said the company was closely watching Google Cloud’s status page for updates but didn’t give a specific recovery time.
While Google has reassured users that services should be restored within hours, the outage affected millions, cutting into the workday and disrupting productivity and entertainment across the internet. It’s a strong reminder of how dependent the digital world has become on cloud infrastructure — and how quickly a problem at the top can ripple out to almost everything online.
