Daijiworld Media Network- Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley, Jun 13: A massive internet disruption swept across global platforms on Thursday, affecting major services including Google, Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, and several others, after a technical fault in Google Cloud brought large parts of the web to a standstill.

Google's own key services—such as Gmail, Search, Maps, and Nest—were hit by the outage. The impact also rippled across third-party apps and online tools that depend on Google’s cloud infrastructure, including Character.ai and the popular Pokémon Trading Card Game platform.

According to a series of updates on Google Cloud’s status page, engineers identified the root cause of the outage by 12:41 PM PT and began mitigation efforts. By 1:16 PM PT, partial recovery was underway, although users in specific regions, especially us-central1, continued to face sluggish response times.

By 6:18 PM PDT, Google confirmed that Vertex AI Online Prediction—one of the services affected—had fully recovered. “All affected services are now operating normally,” read the final update. The company assured users that a comprehensive post-incident report would follow after the internal investigation concludes.

Meanwhile, Cloudflare, another major internet infrastructure provider, clarified that while its core services were largely unaffected, a limited number of its operations relying on Google Cloud experienced temporary interruptions. “This is a Google Cloud outage,” a Cloudflare representative told CNN. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly.”

While services have largely returned to normal, the outage underlines the growing dependence of the digital ecosystem on centralized cloud platforms and raises renewed questions about resilience and contingency in the age of cloud computing.