A massive Google Cloud outage messed up Google Home, Spotify, and other services

The Verge

21 hours ago

On Thursday afternoon, many people with smart home setups connected to Google Home / Nest, or who are trying to stream music on Spotify, started coming up empty. All I got when I tried to open the Spotify website was a message that says 'Audiences in Jwt are not allowed,' and opening the app also pops up an error saying it can't connect.
The issues appear to be tied to problems with Google Cloud that affected server locations globally starting at about 1:51PM ET, and have been largely resolved, with the exception of its servers in the central US area. A quick check of Verge staff members around the globe seems to confirm that access to apps and services is coming back, just not yet here in Michigan.
Spokesperson Alexander Modiano said that a simultaneous outage report on Thursday from Cloudflare was due to the problems with Google Cloud, and that '…core Cloudflare services were not impacted.'
We saw issue reports spike on outage trackers like Downdetector and ThousandEyes, as well as some error messages popping up for other large cloud-based services, like Twitch, Snapchat, Anthropic, Shopify, and Discord, but it wasn't entirely clear what caused the problem or exactly which platforms were affected.
Google Cloud's status page initially didn't list any issues, but later updated to report 'Multiple GCP products are experiencing impact due to Identity and Access Management Service Issue.'
The most recent note from Google, posted at 3:41PM ET, says:
Our engineers have identified the root cause and have applied appropriate mitigations.
While our engineers have confirmed that the underlying dependency is recovered in all locations except us-central1, we are aware that customers are still experiencing varying degrees of impact on individual google cloud products. All the respective engineering teams are actively engaged and working on service recovery.
We do not have an ETA for full service recovery.
We will provide an update by Thursday, 2025-06-12 13:30 PDT with current details
Incident affecting Agent Assist, Cloud Data Fusion, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Shell, Cloud Workstations, Contact Center Insights, Dialogflow CX, Dialogflow ES, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Console, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Storage, Identity Platform, Identity and Access Management, Memorystore for Memcached, Memorystore for Redis, Memorystore for Redis Cluster, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, Vertex AI Search
Google's update trailed a message from Replit CEO Amjad Masad at 2:34PM ET, when he had already tweeted, 'Google cloud is having an outage and that's taking Replit down. We're working with them to bring it back up ASAP.'
Spotify is also a well-known Google Cloud customer and has been affected by outages on its network before.
There was also an outage listed by Cloudflare on Thursday afternoon, which provides network infrastructure and content delivery services to a number of online platforms, noting 'Broad Cloudflare service outages,' but that was due to the Google Cloud issues. 'A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted,' writes Alexander Modiano in response to a question from The Verge, 'We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted.'
We are starting to see services recover. We still expect to see intermittent errors across the impacted services as systems handle retried and caches are filled.