If your dashboards froze, your collaboration tools stalled, your playlist suddenly stopped, or your CI/CD pipelines timed out on June 12, you weren’t alone. Google Cloud had a major hiccup that briefly knocked large chunks of the internet offline. In just minutes, dozens of apps and services such as Atlassian, Cloudflare, Spotify, Replit, Snowflake, and even Google’s own Workspace suite, vanished into the void.

A single automated quota update that had gone sideways was the root of all this chaos. One internal misstep in Google’s API management system managed to trip up a global stack of services.

From about 11:46 a.m. PT to early afternoon, the internet limped along while Google engineers worked to right the ship. Most services were back within a couple of hours, however this event was a reminder of how closely we’re all tethered to only a handful of cloud platforms.

Why It Matters: When apps froze and pages stopped loading, we saw just how quickly one issue in the cloud can ripple across the internet. A small failure escalated into widespread disruption across multiple services. Even the most robust platforms rely on complex, interconnected systems that can break in unexpected ways. This outage is a clear reminder of the need for thoughtful architecture and solid contingency plans when so much depends on a handful of cloud layers.

• The Domino Effect: The chaos began with an automated quota update inside Google Cloud’s API management system that invalidated key systems, triggering a cascade of service failures. So many services, and the apps that use them, plug into those APIs for authentication, routing, or workload management, causing that one misfire to echo across the web. Systems scrambled to catch up and in many cases, simply failed.

• Services You Rely On: What made this outage so striking was how quickly essential tools went dark. CI/CD pipelines stalled, dashboards stopped updating, and collaboration platforms became unreachable. Developer-focused tools like Replit and AI platforms like Character.AI also dropped offline. Even internal apps and cloud services tied to Google Workspace were impacted. Downdetector lit up with reports as teams across industries scrambled to adjust.

• Cloudflare Wasn’t Immune: Cloudflare, the go-to fortress for website reliability, felt the tremors as well. Despite the core infrastructure holding, several of its systems that rely on Google Cloud experienced degraded performance. Their engineering team confirmed the dependency, calling out a “third-party vendor failure” (i.e., Google) as the root cause exhibiting that companies built on resilience can still get snagged when one piece of their stack goes down.

• Region Matters: Google Cloud spans multiple global zones, with regions varying in both capacity and recovery behavior. Most zones recovered within about 90 minutes, while us-central1 in Iowa remained delayed. This region supports a large share of U.S. workloads, particularly those latency-optimized for central access. That regional delay highlighted how infrastructure choices can affect availability during outages.

• Google Speaks Up: Google was quick to post a preliminary incident summary, owning the disruption and expressing regret. “We are deeply sorry for the impact,” read the note on its status page, where services like Gmail, Calendar, and Meet were slowly marked “resolved.” Later, Google acknowledged residual issues and promised a full postmortem report. The tone was contrite and instructive, acknowledging that even cloud giants are fallible and that recovery isn’t always immediate.

Go Deeper -> A major Google Cloud outage took down swathes of the internet and even Workspace apps – here’s what we know – Tech Radar

Google Cloud outage brings down a lot of the internet – Tech Crunch