A major Google Cloud outage on Thursday threw much of the internet into disarray, knocking out over 70 services and leaving millions — from small businesses to big tech companies — suddenly cut off from the tools they rely on.

The ripple effect was felt far and wide. OpenAI, Shopify, Cloudflare, and other major digital players reported service issues. Even Google’s own tools — including Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Meet — went offline for hours, highlighting just how deeply embedded Google Cloud is in the modern internet.

In a detailed postmortem released Friday, Google admitted the cause was a flawed system update rolled out in May. The problem? A new quota policy feature that had been introduced without proper real-world testing — and more importantly, without feature flags, a standard tool used to control and monitor rollouts safely.

Things began to fall apart when the system started receiving blank data entries. That glitch triggered a domino effect, taking down cloud systems across all regions. Engineers traced the issue in under 10 minutes, but the scale of the damage meant it took over seven hours to fully restore services — especially in Google’s larger data centers, which were hit hardest by system overload.

“We deeply apologise for the impact this outage has had,” Google said in its report. “We’re taking concrete steps to prevent something like this from happening again.”

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian addressed the issue directly on X (formerly Twitter), calling the incident “regrettable” and promising customers that reliability remains a top priority.

“We have been hard at work on the outage today, and we are now fully restored across all regions and products,” Kurian wrote. “We regret the disruption this caused our customers.”

While services are now back online, the outage has sparked renewed concern about the risks of centralized cloud infrastructure. As more companies lean on a small handful of providers to power everything from email to artificial intelligence, Thursday’s failure was a sobering reminder: when a cloud giant stumbles, the entire internet feels it.