Google Cloud outage affecting Gmail, Drive, Spotify, Meet and more resolved: Here’s what the company said

Google Cloud outage

Google Cloud services have been fully restored after a significant outage disrupted platforms and applications for several hours on June 12. The outage, which affected numerous Google products and third-party services, was due to a failure in Google Cloud’s identity and access management (IAM) systems, the company said.

The disruption made services unavailable across Google’s ecosystem, affecting Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Meet, and Google Lens. Third-party platforms that rely on Google Cloud — including popular services like Spotify and Discord — also experienced outages and service failures.

The outage began in the early hours of June 12 and quickly raised alarm as reports flowed in from users across the world. At its peak, tens of thousands of reports were lodged on outage-tracking platforms, reflecting the scale of the incident. The outage disrupted daily operations for businesses and consumers who rely on Google’s platforms for communication, collaboration, and entertainment.

Root cause of outage as per Google

According to Google, the outage was triggered by a failure in its IAM components — a key service responsible for verifying and managing access across Google’s ecosystem. The misconfiguration set off a cascade of service failures and made numerous platforms unreachable. “Our engineers identified the root cause and applied appropriate mitigations promptly to resolve the issue,” Google Cloud said in a status update.

Google confirmed service restoration once mitigation measures were implemented across its ecosystem. “All services are fully recovered from the service issue. We will publish a full analysis once we have completed our internal investigation. We appreciate your patience while we addressed this incident,” the company said.

The outage highlights the increasing reliance of businesses and consumers on a few large providers for their daily operations. It also highlights the necessity for robust backup and incident response mechanisms to minimise disruption when technical failures arise.

As Google investigates the incident in depth, it has pledged to release a detailed postmortem to provide a clear view of what went awry and how future outages can be avoided. The company’s engineers are currently analysing all aspects of the outage to implement safeguards against future service disruptions.