How the Google Cloud Platform Outage Bricked the Internet

Last week, a simple coding mistake caused a huge problem it actually bricked the internet for hours. Many popular apps like Snapchat, Spotify, and Discord stopped working. Even Cloudflare’s service went down, causing nearly 100% errors for over two hours. This chain reaction brought down websites and services all across the internet.

The culprit? Google Cloud Platform, the giant company that rents servers to many of your favorite apps. Google apologized deeply for the mistake, but this event shows just how much power big cloud providers have over the internet infrastructure we all rely on every day.

What Happened During the Google Cloud Outage?

On June 12th, 2025, Google Cloud faced a massive outage that didn’t just affect outside customers it also took down Google’s own services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Meet. When services this big go down, companies lose millions of dollars.

Many companies using cloud services have contracts called Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which promise that the services will be up and running 99.99% of the time or more. When something like this outage happens, the cloud provider breaks that contract. That means Google might have to refund some companies for the downtime which could cost Google millions. But the bigger hit is to their reputation. Google Cloud is usually behind Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS in the market, and this outage could hurt their position even more.

How Did the Outage Happen?

Google’s software engineers added a new feature to the cloud’s API management system on May 29th. This system helps check if requests to Google Cloud are allowed. It uses a database that quickly copies data across Google's 42 data center regions worldwide.

The problem was that the new feature wasn’t tested properly. The specific part of the code that caused the issue didn’t run during testing because it needed a certain policy change to activate it. When this change finally happened on June 12th, the system crashed. This crash loop caused widespread failures.

To make things worse, the buggy code had no proper error handling. This means it couldn’t recover when something went wrong, leading to a “null pointer” error a common coding mistake that causes software to crash.

Google engineers had a “big red button” to roll back the change, but it took 40 minutes to start and about 4 hours to fully fix the problem.

Why Does This Matter?

This Google Cloud outage shows how much of the internet depends on a few big cloud providers. When one of them has a problem, it can cause a domino effect that affects millions of users worldwide.

It’s a reminder that even the biggest tech companies can make mistakes and that reliable internet services depend on careful coding, thorough testing, and quick responses when things go wrong.

Final Thoughts

The recent Google Cloud outage bricked the internet for hours, disrupting services we use every day. It highlights the risks involved when so much of the internet depends on a handful of cloud providers. As Google works to rebuild trust, companies and users should remember the importance of resilient infrastructure and backup plans.

If you want your business to stay online, make sure your cloud provider has strong safeguards and clear plans for emergencies. The internet is powerful, but it’s only as strong as the code and people behind it.