⚙️ What happened
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On June 12 around 1:50 PM ET, a major outage hit Google Cloud's Identity and Access Management (IAM) system, triggering cascading failures across numerous platforms—impacting Google Chat, Meet, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Voice, Cloud Search, and more, as well as third-party services like Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, Twitch, Shopify, and OpenAI
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Downdetector recorded tens of thousands of reports, notably ~46,000 for Spotify and ~11,000 for Discord
🛠️ Google’s response & resolution
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Google Cloud engineers implemented a fix by bypassing the faulty quota check, restoring most services within about 2–3 hours; regions like us-central1 experienced slightly longer recovery times
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By June 13, all services were confirmed fully restored .
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Google released a "mini incident report", and will follow up with a full incident analysis. They apologized and pledged improvements
Root cause: a system bug—a null pointer crash—triggered by an invalid automated quota update in IAM, which wasn’t covered by proper error handling or feature flag safeguards .
🌐 Broader impacts
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The outage underscored the interdependence of many services on Google Cloud, causing global ripple effects across both consumer and enterprise platforms
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It raises questions about system resilience, error handling, and redundancy strategies in widely used API infrastructure.
✅ Summary Table
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Start Time | June 12, ~1:50 PM ET |
| Duration | ~2–3 hours globally (longer in some regions) |
| Affected Services | Google Workspace apps, cloud services, plus third-party platforms |
| Resolution | Faulty quota check bypass, full recovery June 13 |
| Root Cause | IAM quota policy update leading to null pointer crashes |
| Next Steps | Full incident report & measures to prevent recurrence |