Google Cloud named cause of internet outage by Cloudflare rep

A widespread internet outage caused major disruption on Thursday afternoon.
 By 
Timothy Beck Werth
 on 
a google cloud logo under a thumb
Credit: Photo Illustration by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images

UPDATE: June 13, 2025, 11:00 a.m. ET — The massive internet outage that took down large swaths of the internet on Thursday appeared to be fully resolved.

Google Cloud — named as the source of the disruption by a Cloudflare representative — wrote that all services had "been fully restored" in its latest statement. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote on X that the company regretted "the disruption this caused our customers."

Cloudflare, meanwhile, apologized for the outage, even as it pinned the ultimate blame on a third party.


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"We’re deeply sorry for this outage: this was a failure on our part, and while the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them," it wrote in a blog post.


Google Cloud was identified by a Cloudflare representative as the cause of a massive outage that disrupted services across the internet Thursday.

The widespread internet outage affected a variety of popular platforms, with users reporting problems accessing Google services, Cloudflare, Spotify, Twitch, and Discord.

The outage also included popular cloud hosting services such as Cloudflare, which reported service disruptions on its status page. However, a Cloudflare representative stated in an email to Mashable that Google Cloud was responsible for the disruptions to internet services.

"This is a Google Cloud outage," a Cloudflare spokesperson told Mashable by email. They added, "A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted."

On the Google Cloud status page, the company initially reported that it was "experiencing service issues with multiple GCP products beginning at Thursday, 2025-06-12 10:51 PDT."

At 3:41 p.m. ET, Google Cloud provided a further update: "Our engineers have identified the root cause and have applied appropriate mitigations. While our engineers have confirmed that the underlying dependency is recovered in all locations except us-central1, we are aware that customers are still experiencing varying degrees of impact on individual google cloud products. All the respective engineering teams are actively engaged and working on service recovery. We do not have an ETA for full service recovery."

On its own status page, Cloudflare reported, "Cloudflare’s critical Workers KV service went offline due to an outage of a 3rd party service that is a key dependency. As a result, certain Cloudflare products that rely on KV service to store and disseminate information are unavailable..."

Mashable reached out to Google for comment on the outages, and we will update this story if they respond.

On Thursday afternoon, the website Down Detector showed a spike in user error reports starting around 2 p.m. ET. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis owns both Mashable and Down Detector.) By 3:30 p.m., service had been restored at many of the affected platforms, though some users are still reporting problems.

Topics Google

headshot of timothy beck werth, a handsome journalist with great hair
Timothy Beck Werth
Tech Editor

Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men’s grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he’s also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl.

Tim studied print journalism at the University of Southern California. He currently splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and Charleston, SC. He's currently working on his second novel, a science-fiction book.

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