Google cloud outage disrupts healthcare AI services worldwide
CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES — A major Google Cloud outage on June 12, 2025, has left healthcare providers and tech-dependent medical services struggling for nearly four hours as critical AI tools went offline.
Healthcare operations hit by AI service disruptions
Among the affected services was Vertex AI, which supports diagnostic processes and works out individual treatment plans; thus, it slowed clinicians in the processing of data.
In the meantime, Dialogflow CX and Agent Assist, which simplified clinical inquiries and office duties, left certain providers using manual procedures.
In addition to direct care, Contact Center AI struggled with scheduling and triaging patients, and consequently, hospitals may face backlogs.
Google admitted that the outage covered more than 50 services and over 40 Google Cloud regions, with Iowa (us-central1) remaining slow to recover. “We have identified the root cause and applied appropriate mitigations. Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1,” Google stated on their status page.
This shows the increasing reliance of healthcare on cloud-based AI and the dangers that can arise in the event of the most important systems failing.
Broader digital and tech sector disruptions
Downtimes were felt in other sectors besides the health sector, including on significant platforms such as Spotify, Discord, and Snapchat, highlighting the fact that Google Cloud is a huge part of the infrastructure.
The outage disrupted risk-scoring algorithms and virtual front-desk services and led to contingency plans for digital health firms.
The outage has raised questions about the redundancy of cloud-based healthcare systems. Google engineers had implemented mitigations, and one aspect of the long outage allowed other industries to show weaknesses in case annual uptimes were vital.
“Google Cloud products that rely on the affected infrastructure are seeing recovery in multiple locations. Our engineers are aware of the customers still experiencing issues on us-central1 and multi-region/us and are actively working on full recovery,” the tech giant stated.
