Today, June 12, 2025, a sweeping internet disruption rattled the digital landscape, knocking out key platforms such as Google (including Gmail, Maps, Cloud), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, OpenAI, Anthropic, Shopify, Snapchat, and others.
What happened
Between 1:50 PM and 2:00 PM ET, systems worldwide began failing. Downdetector reported massive spikes for Spotify (40 K+), Discord (11 K+), Google (10 K+)—clear signs of a significant fault.
Cause behind the chaos
Early indications pointed to a malfunction in Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management Service (IAM). Google engineers later confirmed that this IAM failure disrupted multiple services like App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Firestore, and more. Cloudflare also confirmed that services relying heavily on Google Cloud were impacted. AWS’s network appeared largely unaffected, though some secondary disruptions emerged through dependency chains.
Impact on users and services
- Spotify, Discord, Twitch, Snapchat, Anthropic, Shopify and other Google Cloud customers reported “connection errors” and “login failures”.
- Users experienced downtime on Google Home, Nest, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Meet .
- Downdetector flags and social media buzz surged globally.
Response & recovery
By mid‑afternoon, Google’s status dashboard confirmed engineers had identified the issue, applied mitigations, and partial recovery was underway—though no full resolution ETA was provided. Cloudflare noted intermittent errors might persist as caches refill and systems stabilize. AWS officially reported no direct service disruption.
Why it matters
This outage underscores how heavily the web ecosystem relies on cloud infrastructure and IAM services. When a core component—like IAM—is compromised, it can disable thousands of popular platforms in a matter of minutes, as witnessed today.
What users should do
- Stay tuned to official status pages (Google Cloud, Cloudflare, AWS) for updates.
- If services remain unavailable, consider using alternative platforms or wait—it appears full recovery is within hours.
- For businesses affected by this interruption, having multi‑cloud redundancy and backup IAM solutions can help minimize future risks.
In Summary
On June 12, 2025, a Google Cloud IAM failure triggered a global outage affecting major services from Google to Spotify and Discord. While engineers are actively resolving the issue, lingering intermittent errors are expected during the system recovery. This event highlights the fragility of our cloud‑centric world and the importance of infrastructure resilience.
