Massive US cloud outages at Google and Cloudflare paralyze web services

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Google Cloud and Cloudflare have been struggling with serious disruptions since this evening, affecting numerous internet services in the USA. The problems began at around 7:45 pm German time and have since spread. The outages could also have an impact on cloud services worldwide.

Google Cloud: IAM problems as the cause

A fundamental problem with the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service has been identifiedat Google Cloud. This affects numerous services:

• Cloud Data Fusion
• Cloud Memorystore
• Cloud Shell and Cloud Workstations
• Google Cloud Bigtable
• Google Cloud Console
• Google Cloud Dataproc
• Google Cloud Storage
• Identity Platform
• Vertex AI Search
• Memorystore for Memcached and Redis

Google has confirmed that the disruption is global and affects virtually all cloud regions, including locations in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. When asked by heise online, a Google spokesperson said: "We are currently investigating a service disruption to some Google Cloud services. Please check our public status dashboard for the latest updates." On the global dashboard, you can see (see image) that the US outages are causing (partial) disruptions in all regions of the world.

Cloudflare: Cascading outages

In parallel, Cloudflare is reporting a series of service outages that seem to reinforce each other:

• Access authentication failures
• Zero Trust WARP connectivity issues
• SQLite-based Durable Object outages
• Workers KV failures
• Problems with Realtime and Workers AI
• Stream interruptions
• Partial outages of the Cloudflare dashboard
• Impairments with AI Gateway and AutoRAG

Cloudflare writes on its status page: "We are starting to see services recover. However, we continue to expect intermittent errors on affected services as systems process repeated requests and caches are filled."

Far-reaching impact on US services

The disruptions to these core cloud infrastructure providers have cascading effects on numerous popular services. Users in the US are reporting problems with:

• Spotify: streaming interruptions and login issues
• YouTube: Video playback disruptions and loading issues
• Google Gemini: AI service partially unavailable
• Discord: connection problems
• Snapchat: Login and messaging difficulties
• Firebase Studio: Development environment impaired
• NPM: Package Manager problems

The monitoring portal Downdetector has recorded tens of thousands of reports since the disruptions began. Although the first signs of recovery can be observed, there is still no official all-clear.

(vza)