How ScalingWeb Navigated the June 12, 2025 Google Cloud Outage

Introduction
On June 12, 2025 at 10:51 PDT, Google Cloud experienced a widespread API outage that affected over 40 services across virtually every region worldwide. This incident threatened to disrupt mission-critical workloads, from website hosting to data analytics pipelines. At ScalingWeb Digital Services, maintaining high availability and seamless user experiences is our top priority. This post details how we rapidly detected, mitigated, and ultimately routed around the Google Cloud outage—keeping our clients’ applications up and running with minimal disruption.

1. Outage Background
At 10:51 PDT on June 12, Google Cloud reported failures in API requests across a broad spectrum of products, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Run, Firestore, Monitoring, Vertex AI Search, and many more
status.cloud.google.com. Initial updates confirmed that there was no immediate workaround available, and engineering teams began investigations without an estimated time to resolution
status.cloud.google.com.

2. Incident Timeline

• 10:51 PDT: Outage begins; API calls for multiple GCP products start failing. Symptoms: requests time out or return errors, with no workaround available at the time
  status.cloud.google.com.
• 11:46 PDT: Google confirms continued service issues and schedules the next update for 12:15 PDT
  status.cloud.google.com.
• 11:59 PDT: Investigation ongoing; engineers working on root-cause analysis. Next update set for 12:15 PDT
  status.cloud.google.com.
• 12:09 PDT: Partial recoveries observed in some locations; mitigations in progress with no ETA for full resolution
  status.cloud.google.com.
• 12:30 PDT: Full recovery achieved in all regions except us-central1, which was “mostly recovered.” No ETA yet for complete restoration in us-central1
  status.cloud.google.com.
• 12:41 PDT: Root cause identified; mitigations applied globally except for remaining work in us-central1. Customers in that region still face residual issues
  status.cloud.google.com.
• 13:16 PDT: Infrastructure recovered in all regions except us-central1; engineering teams continue to drive toward full recovery, with no ETA provided
  status.cloud.google.com.

3. Impact on ScalingWeb’s Platform
Our services—hosted primarily in us-central1—experienced:

• API Failures & Latency Spikes: Dynamic content fetches (dashboards, analytics) returned errors or experienced elevated response times.
• Deployment Interruptions: CI/CD pipelines targeting affected regions timed out, delaying rollouts.
• Database Connectivity Issues: Cloud SQL connections from us-central1 instances intermittently failed, triggering timeouts.

4. Rapid Mitigation & Failover Strategy
To shield our clients from downtime, we executed a multi-pronged strategy within minutes:

1. Activated Multi-Region Endpoints
   • Reconfigured all GCP SDK clients to use multi-region endpoints (us-east1, europe-west1) with us-central1 as primary only.
   • This allowed automatic fallback to healthy regions on any us-central1 API failure.
2. Load Balancer Failover
   • Updated our HTTP(S) Load Balancer backends to include instances in us-east1 and us-west1.
   • Health checks immediately removed unhealthy us-central1 nodes, shifting traffic to healthy pools without manual intervention.
3. Terraform & CI/CD Hotfix
   • Pushed an emergency update to our Infrastructure-as-Code modules, provisioning critical services (Cloud Run, Functions, Redis) in at least two regions.
   • Deployed the hotfix in under 30 minutes, ensuring standby capacity in alternate regions.
4. DNS TTL Reduction & Geo-Routing
   • Lowered DNS TTLs from 300 seconds to 60 seconds for our API domains.
   • Implemented Geo-DNS rules so that client requests would prefer the nearest healthy region if us-central1 was unreachable.
5. Client-Side Resiliency
   • Released a library update for front-end and mobile applications with exponential-backoff retries.
   • After five failed attempts to us-central1, calls automatically retried against us-east1.
6. Proactive Monitoring & Chaos Drills
   • Ramped up synthetic canary tests against backup regions to validate performance under load.
   • Conducted an impromptu staging-environment failover drill—black-holing us-central1—to prove our fallback mechanisms.
7. Transparent Communication
   • Sent real-time alerts via email (info@scalingweb.com) and Slack, detailing affected services, fallback regions, and expected latency changes.
   • Updated our status page with live metrics from fallback regions and advised clients of minor performance differentials.

5. Results & Lessons Learned

• Minimal Client Impact: Within 15 minutes of the outage, most production traffic was seamlessly routed through us-east1 and us-west1, preserving application availability.
• Validated Resilience: Our multi-region deployments, failover scripts, and retries performed as designed under real-world stress.
• Next Steps:
  • Enforce multi-region provisioning for all new services.
  • Maintain low DNS TTLs and robust client-side fallbacks.
  • Schedule quarterly chaos-engineering drills to continually test and refine our resilience posture.

Conclusion
The June 12 Google Cloud outage underscored the importance of designing systems for geo-redundancy and automated failover. At ScalingWeb Digital Services, our rapid response—built on infrastructure-as-code, intelligent routing, and proactive monitoring—ensured uninterrupted service for our clients. We remain committed to continuous improvement, rigorous testing, and transparent communication so that your digital experiences remain reliable, even in the face of unforeseen disruptions.

For any questions or support, please contact us at info@scalingweb.com or call +1-561-543-7352.