Published by Cyberkach.com – Cybersecurity at Your Fingertips
🕒 Updated: 12 June 2025, 22:50 GMT
Images sourced from Downdetector.
Today, the internet felt like it broke.
From Spotify to Discord, Google Docs to Character AI, countless services went dark, glitched, or slowed to a crawl—probably tied to a major outage affecting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Cloudflare.
What Happened?
Around 18:51 GMT, a failure began spreading across Google Cloud services. Shortly after, by 19:19 GMT, Cloudflare also started reporting issues—particularly around authentication and identity systems tied to Google infrastructure.
Who Was Affected?
In a word: everyone.
- Major platforms: Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, Twitch, Shopify, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Meet
- Smart home devices: Google Home and Nest services misfired or froze
- Productivity and AI tools: Character AI, Notion, Figma, and others saw access problems
- Gaming & streaming: Latency and login errors hit games and services integrated with GCP or Cloudflare
Downdetector reports spiked globally, especially in North America and Europe.
The Technical Root
The root cause may be tied to Google Cloud’s Identity & Access Management (IAM) service. The issue started with IAM failing at 18:51 GMT, which triggered authentication disruptions across Google Cloud’s ecosystem.
“This is a Google Cloud outage … core Cloudflare services were not impacted,”
— Cloudflare spokesperson, via TechCrunch
Google’s status dashboard lists services like IAM, Compute Engine, BigQuery, Firebase, and App Engine as degraded or unavailable. The IAM failure may have blocked token issuance and access validation, which would explain the widespread ripple effects across dependent systems.
What’s the Status Now?
As of 22:00 GMT, the picture is improving—but not yet resolved:
- Google Cloud has implemented mitigations, but no full resolution ETA has been shared
- Cloudflare is seeing partial recovery in affected tools
- AWS and Azure remain operational, but third-party apps that integrate with GCP may still show glitches
The Cyberkach Take
This is a wake-up call about the concentration of critical infrastructure in the hands of a few cloud giants. IAM systems, while invisible to end users, form the backbone of access and trust in the cloud. When they fail, the ripple effect is swift and brutal.
You can:
- Consider implementing multi-cloud or hybrid fallback strategies
- Review any hard dependency on third-party IAM
- Monitor with anomaly detection and not just dashboards
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