Google Reveals Cause Behind Major Cloud Outage Disrupting Global Services

On Thursday, a widespread disruption in Google Cloud services sent ripples across the digital world, temporarily knocking out several popular platforms including Google Home, Spotify, Snapchat, and even parts of Cloudflare’s operations. In a follow-up statement, Google has offered initial insights into the cause behind the significant outage.

The tech giant attributed the incident to an internal glitch—specifically, an invalid automated quota update within its API management system. This misconfigured update was inadvertently propagated globally, which led to the rejection of external API requests. As a result, services dependent on Google Cloud infrastructure experienced abrupt service interruptions.

Google shared more details in a preliminary incident report, stating:

"From our initial analysis, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected."

To address the crisis, Google’s engineers bypassed the faulty quota check. This quick action enabled service restoration in most affected regions within approximately two hours. However, full recovery wasn't uniform across all locations. The company acknowledged that one of its key regions—us-central1—faced a prolonged disruption due to additional complications.

"To recover we bypassed the offending quota check, which allowed recovery in most regions within 2 hours. However, the quota policy database in us-central1 became overloaded, resulting in much longer recovery in that region," the company explained.

The outage didn’t just impact Google-owned services. Cloudflare, a major player in internet infrastructure, also reported issues related to Google’s disruption. According to Cloudflare's own statement, the outage caused the failure of a central data store essential to one of its services, underlining the interconnected nature of today’s cloud ecosystems.

As investigations continue, Google is expected to release a more detailed root cause analysis in the coming days. For now, the event highlights how even routine system updates—if misconfigured—can have sweeping effects across global digital platforms.