After Massive Google Outage, Just How Resilient Is The Cloud? One Report Sheds Some Light

IT leaders air their concerns about the cloud.

A Google Cloud outage took place Thursday, temporarily rendering almost every Google cloud service app inaccessible, as well as some Google Cloud-dependent third-party apps including Discord, Spotify, Snapchat and a host of other services including business platforms, as MES Computing’s sister site, Computing, reported.

According to a blog post from Google, the outage began June 12, 2025 10:49 PT and was resolved by June 12, 2025 13:49 PT.

Here’s what Google stated about the incident on its blog:

“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 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. Several products had moderate residual impact (e.g. backlogs) for up to an hour after the primary issue was mitigated and a small number recovering after that.

Google will complete a full Incident Report in the following days that will provide a detailed root cause.”

One CEO is stating that such massive cloud outages bring into question the resilience of cloud architecture.

“We’re long past the point where outages like this should be seen as isolated incidents. What we’re seeing today is the failure of systems that were never architected for real-world chaos — systems that assumed downtime was rare, that traffic was human-paced, and that regional dependency wasn’t a liability,” said Spencer Kimball, Cockroach Labs’ co-founder and CEO, and former Google engineer, in a statement shared with MES Computing.

“AI runs 24/7. Agents don’t sleep. Outages now cascade not just across services, but entire economies. And yet most infrastructure is still optimized for peak concurrency and steady-state assumptions. That’s the gap — and we’re watching it rupture in real time,” Kimball continued.

“Resilience isn’t a feature you layer on. It’s an architectural commitment. Performance under adversity — not in perfect conditions — is the real benchmark now. If your system can’t absorb failure without taking your customers down with it, you’re not production-ready in 2025 — especially not in the AI era,” he added.

In a statement to MES Computing, a Google spokesperson responded: “Following a disruption to a number of Google Cloud services, all products have now been fully restored. Please see Thomas’s [Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud] statement on X and monitor our public status dashboard for the analysis on this incident.”

In “The State of Resilience 2025: Confronting Outages, Downtime, and Organizational Readiness” report authored by Cockroach Labs in conjunction with Wakefield Research, a survey of 1,000 senior cloud architects, engineering, and technology executives across the globe, found shared concerns among tech executives about the state of cloud resiliency:

• 93 percent of IT leaders said they were “concerned about the financial and organizational impact of outages.”
• 48 percent said their organizations aren’t doing enough about cloud resiliency.
• 100 percent said they experienced loss in revenue from outages in the past 12 months.
• Those surveyed reported an average of 86 outages per year.
• 70 percent of large enterprises reported that it took 60 minutes or more to come back from an outage. Nearly half of the respondents’ said that their average downtime due to outages was two or more hours.
• Thirty-three percent said they have a structured response approach to outages.
• Less than one-third of those surveyed said they conduct regular failover testing.

Read the full report here.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include Google’s response.