Identity and access management failure in Google Cloud causes widespread internet service disruptions – News

An identity and access management failure within Google Cloud earlier today caused widespread service disruptions across a range of internet services, including portions of Cloudflare Inc., Google Workspace apps and third-party platforms reliant on Google infrastructure.

The incident began late Wednesday morning PDT and was traced to a misconfiguration within Google Cloud’s IAM systems. The disruption triggered outages in critical cloud components such as App Engine, Firestore, Cloud SQL, BigQuery and Memorystore. As a result, numerous services that depend on these components either failed or became intermittently available.

Among the first to report issues was Cloudflare, which confirmed that some of its services, including Workers KV, Access authentication, Workers AI, Stream and parts of the dashboard, were affected due to their dependency on Google Cloud. “This is a Google Cloud outage,” a spokesperson for Cloudflare told CRN. “A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted.”

The outage was widely felt. Users of Google Workspace experienced failures across Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar, Meet and Chat, while Google Home and Nest devices also suffered connectivity problems. Google’s Gemini and search-related services, including Lens and Discover, were also intermittently down. On social media, users reported that voice search and assistant functions were nonresponsive.

Companies that rely on Google services were also affected by the outage. Some of the companies affected included Spotify Technology Inc., Discord Inc., Snap Inc., Shopify Inc., Replit Inc., Anthropic PBC, Character Technologies Inc., fuboTV Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc., many of which experienced partial downtime or degraded performance.

In probably one of the most visited pages on the internet today, the Google Cloud status page gave regular updates, starting from 11:46 a.m. PDT. As of the time of writing, the status page stated that most Google Cloud products are fully recovered, but added that “there is some residual impact for the products currently marked as affected on the dashboard.”

According to Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, reports from affected users peaked at around 2:30 p.m. EDT, but there were still a few people reporting issues as of 5:30 p.m. EDT.

Some reports today also suggested at the Amazon Web Services Inc. may have also suffered an outage, but there is no evidence that AWS, other than maybe a few minor product issues, were affected by the Google outage. One exception, though, wasn’t directly AWS-related, but a service owned by Amazon.com Inc. — the streaming service Twitch, which may have been affected by network-level interdependencies, such as DNS, authentication or content delivery network provision.

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