Google Cloud, Cloudflare struck by widespread outages
Multiple companies investigated a widespread outage Thursday. Google Cloud later said it was due to a faulty API update and promises a full incident report of the root cause.
Google Cloud is blaming Thursday's massive global outage -- affecting dozens of its own products and the products of other providers, including Cloudflare and Spotify -- on a faulty API update.
In a preliminary incident report, Google said the culprit was an invalid automated quota update to its API management system, causing external API requests to fail.
"This incident should not have happened, and we will take the following measures to prevent future recurrence: Prevent our API management platform from failing due to invalid or corrupt data[, p]revent metadata from propagating globally without appropriate protection, testing and monitoring in place[, and i]mprove system error handling and comprehensive testing for handling of invalid data," Google Cloud stated on its status page. It promised to provide a full report of the incident as well as remediation steps it would take.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian took to X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday night, stating, "We have been hard at work on the outage today and we are now fully restored across all regions and products. We regret the disruption this caused our customers."
Cloudflare said many of its own services, including WARP, SQLite-backed Durable Objects, Workers KV, Realtime, Workers AI, Stream, Waiting Room, some Cloudflare dashboard items, AI Gateway and AutoRAG, were down for more than two hours due to the outage.
"This was a failure on our part, and while the proximate cause (or trigger) for this outage was a third-party vendor failure, we are ultimately responsible for our chosen dependencies and how we choose to architect around them," Cloudflare stated.
It pointed to an underlying storage service used by its Workers KV service, itself described as a critical dependency for many of Cloudflare's products, as the root cause of the service disruption. The company reported that Workers KV saw 90.22% of requests failing during the outage.
I know that these kinds of incidents have real and serious impact for teams around the world as they do their work and serve their own customers.
Dane KnechtCTO, Cloudflare
"Our Workers KV service failed and the downstream products that rely on that service had outages of their own. We will publish a full postmortem soon," wrote Dane Knecht, Cloudflare CTO, in a post on X.
"I know that these kinds of incidents have real and serious impact for teams around the world as they do their work and serve their own customers," he continued. "Beyond the specifics of this incident, the postmortem will go into detail about how we are removing this failure case. We will do everything we can to make this right going forward and I apologize for the problems caused today."
In December, Cloudflare said about 20% of the web flows through its network and that it has millions of customers, including 35% of Fortune 500 companies.
Google Cloud is currently ranked third behind AWS and Microsoft Azure with 12% of the cloud market share, according to a February report from Synergy Research Group. Google Cloud Platform has a customer base of nearly 960,000, half of which are in North America, according to a 2024 market report from HG Insights.
A reason to diversify
The incident might fuel more diversification in the cloud market, according to Pradeep Sanyal, AI and data leader at Capgemini.
"In the cloud era, it's common for even the most technically sophisticated companies to optimize for performance, cost and simplicity by leaning on one provider," he said in an interview. "But as this incident shows, that convenience comes with real risk, especially when foundational services like storage or API management are involved."
Thursday's outage also tells a story about the tangled web of network infrastructure, according to Sanyal. "On the technical side, the outage underscores how deeply intertwined the modern internet has become," he said. "When a single API misconfiguration at Google can cascade into outages for Cloudflare, Spotify and countless others, it's a wake-up call. The fact that Cloudflare's Workers KV storage was a single point of failure is especially instructive."
Sanyal added that he believes an incident like this will lead to more diversification among large-scale providers, at least in the short to medium term.
"However," Sanyal said, "diversification comes with its own costs and complexities. For hyperscalers and their largest customers ... it's likely to become a board-level conversation."
This story was updated on 6/13/2025.
Shane Snider, a veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience, covers IT infrastructure at Informa TechTarget.
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