Finance

Massive Google Cloud Outage: The API Glitch That Left Millions in the Dark

2025-06-13

Author: Jia

A Cloud Catastrophe Strikes!

Google has officially blamed an API management glitch for the staggering outage that hit Google Cloud on Thursday, shaking services used by millions globally.

The Timeline of Trouble

The chaos began at 10:49 AM ET and persisted until 3:49 PM ET, leaving users unable to access essential tools like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and more for a grueling three hours.

Ripple Effects Felt Beyond Google

The impact rippled far beyond Google's own operations, affecting popular third-party platforms such as Spotify, Discord, and Snapchat. Many of these services faced disruptions due to their reliance on Google Cloud.

A Sincere Apology from Google

"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this has caused to our users and their customers. Businesses of all sizes trust Google Cloud with their critical workloads, and we are committed to improving our systems," Google stated.

Understanding the Breakdown

While Google is still preparing a comprehensive incident report, the tech giant revealed that a faulty automated quota update triggered a surge of 503 errors, blocking API requests across the board.

According to Google, the issue stemmed from invalid data within their API management platform, worsened by inadequate testing and error-handling protocols.

Cloudflare's Insights on the Situation

After restoring its services, Cloudflare clarified that their outage wasn't due to a security breach but a failure in storage infrastructure tied to their Workers KV service, which relies on third-party resources.

Though Cloudflare didn't disclose the name of the provider, they confirmed that only services depending on Google Cloud were affected. In a bid to prevent such issues in the future, Cloudflare plans to migrate its KV storage to its own infrastructure.

What’s Next for Google Cloud?

As Google takes the necessary steps to prevent future outages, this incident serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities that come with heavy reliance on cloud services. The tech giant promises a better, more resilient system moving forward.