• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 16, 2025

Google Cloud last week experienced a major widespread outage, and days later released a detailed report sharing why it failed.

Multiple Google Cloud and Google Workspace products experienced increased 503 errors in external API requests, impacting customers.

In a status report, the company blamed the occurrence on an “invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected.”

To recover, Google bypassed the “quota check” allowing it to recover in most regions within two hours, but the quota policy database in us-central1 became overloaded, resulting in much longer recovery in that region.

Its customers had intermittent API and user-interface access, but Google said existing streaming and Infrastructure as a Service -- a cloud computing model that provides on-demand access to computing resources like servers, storage, and networking over the internet -- were not impacted.

Cloud computing has become important or more important than search and ad services because it has become the backbone of Google’s business. Since May, the company Google’s cloud division has signed

Since May 1, 2025, Google Cloud has signed several significant deals related to AI and expanding cloud infrastructure.

OpenAI signed a deal with Google Cloud for additional computing capacity for AI model training and operation. The partnership seeks to reduce OpenAI's reliance on one cloud vendor and increase the availability of computing resources.

Google Cloud has also announced a partnership with Databricks, integrating Gemini models into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

Amadeus and Google Cloud partnered to advance cloud-based operations and AI innovation in the travel industry.

When Google Cloud failed, several products had moderate residual impact for up to one hour after the primary issue was mitigated, and a small number were recovering after that.

Google completed an Incident Report that described the root cause. “We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had. Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Despite all the technology, experience and knowledge, Google will need to do better because unplugging the internet is no longer an option.

Too many companies rely on it for support, and it has too many competitors to make these types of mistakes.