How Google Broke The Internet

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On June 12, Discord, Spotify, Snapchat, ChatGPT, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, and numerous other services all went down together. Media houses were quick to describe this as an “internet outage,” with some pointing at more realistic possibilities and others speculating a massive cyberattack.

We know the reason now. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) went down for some time which resulted in multiple services using GCP going down including some Cloudfare services which are also used by several websites which may not directly depend on GCP. This made it look like a complete internet outage instead of some fault with just Google’s cloud offering.

This is yet another example of how much power cloud providers hold over the internet.

The outage across services lasted for about 2 hours - some recovered earlier and some went down late. This is a huge blemish for Google. It has been lagging in the cloud market share for years with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure much ahead of it.

From a technical perspective, this is what happened - the bug (originally a feature) in one of the GCP API services that caused the crash was originally committed into production on May 29th but it needed a policy change to get triggered. This policy change was not done and the bug (aka feature) lay dormant for a while.

On June 12th, in a separate change, a policy change was made which triggered the bug. It took the engineers around 40 minutes to identify the root cause and initiate the rollback to restore normalcy. Eventually after about 4 hours, operations were completely restored across all services.

GCP has around 11-12% market share in the world. AWS has around 29% and Azure holds about 22%.

The GCP outage is quite similar to the Crowdstrike incident that shook almost all Windows systems across the world.

Google “deeply apologized” for the incident. I wonder if any company tried suing Google for violating the GCP SLA which claims to provide 99.99% uptime.

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