Google, Spotify among platforms hit by major cloud service outage

A widespread internet outage disrupted access to several major platforms on June 12, including Google, Spotify, Discord, Twitch, and AWS-based services. The disruption was triggered by authentication failures in Cloudflare’s infrastructure and a simultaneous issue in Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems.

The incident began at approximately 2:00 p.m. ET when users started reporting errors across a range of cloud-powered applications. Cloudflare’s status page confirmed problems with Workers KV, WARP, Pages, and AI Gateway, among others. At the same time, Google Cloud reported difficulties with IAM that affected numerous services, including BigQuery, App Engine, Vertex AI, and Cloud Storage.

According to tracking service Downdetector, more than 44,000 users reported issues with Spotify, while over 11,000 flagged problems with Discord. Additional disruptions were observed on Google Search, Maps, Meet, Drive, Snapchat, and several e-commerce and AI platforms that rely on Google Cloud or Cloudflare APIs.

Google stated that recovery was underway in most regions by 6:12 p.m. UTC but acknowledged persistent problems in the central U.S. cloud region. Cloudflare also confirmed gradual restoration of services, though some dashboards and APIs continued to show degraded performance into the evening hours.

While Amazon Web Services (AWS) initially appeared on Downdetector’s outage list, the company later clarified that its systems were operating normally and were not directly affected by the core incident.

The outages underscore the internet’s growing dependence on a few centralized cloud infrastructures. Analysts warn that failures in overlapping systems, like Google Cloud and Cloudflare, can lead to cascading disruptions across unrelated platforms.

Officials from both companies have promised a full postmortem in the coming days. Until then, users are advised to monitor official status dashboards and consider failover options for critical operations.