Google Cloud Suffers Major Disruption After API Management Error

Google Cloud experienced one of its most significant outages in recent years, disrupting a vast array of services and impacting millions of users and businesses worldwide.

The disruption, which lasted for over three hours, was traced back to a critical error in Google Cloud’s API management system, highlighting the vulnerabilities inherent in modern cloud infrastructure.

The outage began at approximately 10:49 AM PDT on June 12, 2025, and quickly escalated, affecting Google Cloud’s core services and a broad spectrum of third-party platforms reliant on its infrastructure.

Key Google services such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Meet, and Google Docs were rendered inaccessible or unstable.

The ripple effect extended to high-profile customers like Spotify, Discord, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Shopify, and Twitch, with many reporting service interruptions and degraded performance.

Crowdsourced outage tracker Downdetector recorded over 1.4 million user reports globally, underscoring the scale of the incident. 

The disruption was not limited to North America; regions across Europe, Asia, and Australia also reported significant service issues, with some locations experiencing longer recovery times than others.

API Management System Failure

Google’s investigation revealed that the incident was triggered by an invalid automated quota update to its API management system.

This erroneous update was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected and resulting in widespread 503 errors across Google Cloud and Workspace products. 

The core binary responsible for policy checks, known as Service Control, encountered a null pointer exception due to unintended blank fields in policy data, leading to a crash loop that propagated across all regions.

While Google’s Site Reliability Engineering team identified the root cause within minutes and initiated mitigation steps, the recovery process was complicated by the scale of the failure.

Most regions saw service restoration within two hours, but the us-central1 region (Iowa) experienced prolonged issues due to database overload and lacked sufficient backoff mechanisms, delaying full recovery by several hours.

Aftermath and Remediation

Google has issued a public apology, acknowledging the disruption’s impact on its customers’ businesses and trust. 

The company has committed to several remediation steps, including:

• Modularizing Service Control’s architecture to ensure failures do not cascade.
• Auditing systems that consume globally replicated data to improve validation and error detection.
• Enforcing feature flag protections for critical changes.
• Enhancing static analysis, testing practices, and implementing randomized exponential backoff.
• Improving external communications and ensuring monitoring infrastructure remains operational during outages.

This incident has reignited discussions about the resilience and interdependencies of global cloud infrastructure, emphasizing the need for robust safeguards as digital reliance intensifies. 

Google’s swift response and transparency in reporting have been noted, but the event serves as a stark reminder of the cascading risks in today’s interconnected digital ecosystem.

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