A Null Pointer Exception Brought Down Mighty Google;7 Hours of Downtime
4 pavan_panto 3 7/9/2025, 8:29:47 PM getpanto.ai ↗
Comments (3)
pavan_panto · 11m ago
On June 12, 2025, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) suffered a major outage that rippled across the internet. Popular services like Spotify, Discord, Snapchat and others reported widespread failures, as did Google’s own Workspace apps (Gmail, Meet, Drive, etc.). Downdetector showed ~46,000 outage reports for Spotify and ~11,000 for Discord at the peak. According to Google’s status dashboard, the incident began at 10:51 PDT and lasted over seven hours (ending around 6:18 p.m. PDT). In other words, a single configuration error in Google’s control plane caused a global disruption of cloud APIs, authentication, and dependent services.
techlust · 8m ago
Google’s scale is insane, but this shows how fragile even the biggest clouds can be. Hope they drop the full technical details soon.
Metalnem · 55s ago
They did! It was already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274563.