The internet experienced a massive disruption on June 12, 2025, as users across the globe reported issues with major platforms. According to Downdetector, services like Google Cloud, Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, and many more went partially or completely offline. The primary reason? A critical GCP (Google Cloud Platform) outage that sparked widespread concern across industries.
Let’s break down what happened, how Cloudflare responded, what role AWS played, and what this means for the internet infrastructure moving forward.
🔴 What Caused the Google Cloud Outage?
According to official sources and live coverage by Times Now Live, the root cause of the outage was traced to an identity and access management (IAM) failure within GCP systems. This caused service-level authentication breakdowns across multiple APIs and backend platforms. As a result, thousands of websites and apps that rely on Google Cloud experienced access issues, latency spikes, or complete shutdowns.
The keywords “google cloud down”, “gcp outage”, and “google outage” immediately started trending on Twitter, Reddit, and Google Trends.
⚠️ Was Cloudflare Down Too?
Interestingly, Cloudflare, a leading provider of DDoS protection, CDN, and edge computing, was also partially affected. While its core network and DNS services remained up, certain features like Cloudflare Access, WARP, and Dashboard login faced brief service interruptions. This was due to dependency on external identity providers hosted on GCP, not a failure in Cloudflare’s own infrastructure.
The phrase “cloudflare down” started showing up on Downdetector around the same time, but the company clarified that its main services were still operating at full capacity. Cloudflare’s transparent status updates helped reassure developers and enterprise users.
☁️ How Did AWS Respond?
Unlike GCP, AWS (Amazon Web Services) remained unaffected during the June 2025 outage. Many businesses praised AWS’s stability during the event. Some users even migrated temporary workloads from GCP to AWS, fueling ongoing cloud provider rivalry discussions.
The search volume for “AWS vs Google Cloud” and “GCP vs AWS stability” increased significantly, showing renewed interest in multi-cloud strategies and backup infrastructure planning.
💡 What This Teaches Us About the Internet
This incident proves one major point: the internet is deeply interconnected. Even a small error in identity verification systems on GCP can lead to cascading failures that affect platforms like Google Cloud Storage, Firebase, Cloudflare, and even high-traffic applications hosted on them.
Using tools like Downdetector helps end users and IT teams quickly verify if an issue is localized or part of a wider cloud disruption.
✅ Final Thoughts
Cloudflare’s resilience, Google’s transparency, and AWS’s uptime all paint a picture of a high-stakes, fast-moving cloud industry. The Google Cloud outage reminded everyone that even the giants can fall — and the only way forward is stronger cross-cloud failovers, better redundancy planning, and real-time communication.
If you’re running a business, now is the time to reassess your cloud dependency and explore hybrid or multi-cloud solutions to prevent downtime during such outages.