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

On Thursday, June 12, a significant internet outage swept across the globe, disrupting access to a multitude of popular online services. The incident, primarily linked to a technical glitch within Google Cloud's infrastructure, affected countless users relying on platforms such as Gmail, Google Search, Discord, Spotify, and Snapchat. The outage began around 2:30 PM ET (12:00 AM IST on Friday), triggering a flood of error reports on monitoring sites like Down Detector. Over 11,000 complaints originated from India, with an additional 10,000 from the United States. A range of Google services, including Vertex AI and Google Nest, were notably impacted, alongside third-party applications that depend on Google Cloud, such as Character.ai and Rocket League. In addition to these disruptions, other key internet infrastructure providers, including Cloudflare and Shopify, experienced cascading issues that affected numerous websites and applications. Cloudflare acknowledged the situation, citing "broad Cloudflare service outages" and confirming that certain services reliant on Google Cloud were also affected. A spokesperson for Cloudflare stated, “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.” By 1:16 PM PT (1:46 AM IST on Friday), Google Cloud engineers reported that they had pinpointed the root cause and were implementing measures to resolve the issue. While many services began to recover, Google did recognize ongoing performance challenges in its “us-central1” zone. By 6:50 PM ET, both Google and Cloudflare announced that most issues had been addressed, leading to Google Cloud's all-clear update at 9:27 PM ET (6:27 AM IST), which confirmed that all services were fully operational again. A thorough investigation into the outage is set to follow, emphasizing the internet's reliance on a limited number of core infrastructure providers. Users expressed their frustrations on social media, particularly those who found themselves unable to access essential tools such as Google Meet and Gmail during work hours. A variety of other sites, including Shopify, DoorDash, Equifax, and entertainment platforms like Marvel and MLB.tv, were also implicated in the disruption. Google has expressed gratitude towards users for their understanding and has pledged to provide more information following the investigation.