Google has issued an apology and an incident report following a significant outage that affected over 70 Google Cloud services globally. The disruption impacted platforms such as Cloudflare, OpenAI, Shopify, and Google’s own products including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Meet.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the report. “We will do better and are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
The outage, which lasted several hours on Thursday, stemmed from a recent update to Google’s “quota policy checks” feature. This new feature included blank entries that the system could not properly handle, causing crashes across Google Cloud data centers worldwide.
Engineers identified the problem within 10 minutes, but the cascading overload extended the incident for seven hours.
Lessons Learned and Future Actions
Google admitted it did not use feature flags during the rollout, a common practice to reduce risk by gradually enabling new features.
Moving forward, Google plans to redesign its architecture to prevent a single failure from affecting the entire system. The company also intends to audit its systems comprehensively and enhance communication methods to better inform customers during outages.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian expressed regret over the disruption in a public post.
Author’s Opinion
This incident is a reminder that even leading tech companies must carefully balance rapid innovation with thorough testing and risk management. Trust in cloud services depends not only on cutting-edge features but also on stability and transparency when things go wrong. Customers deserve clear communication and swift action to minimize impact and maintain confidence.
Featured image credit: Oracle PR via Flickr
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