A major technical failure in Google Cloud led to a global disruption of several widely used digital services, including Gmail, Google Search, Maps, and third-party apps like Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, and Character.ai. The outage, which began earlier in the day, was resolved by 6:18 PM PDT, with most services restored except for minor delays in the us-central1 region. Google engineers quickly identified the issue and implemented mitigation steps, later confirming full recovery of their systems. Cloudflare also experienced limited service interruptions due to its partial reliance on Google Cloud but clarified that its core operations remained unaffected. Downdetector registered thousands of user complaints across India and the US during the incident. Google has announced plans to release a detailed post-mortem report and thanked users for their patience as services returned to normal.
3
