Overview

• The outage on June 12 halted over 70 Google Cloud services for nearly seven hours after an untested May update triggered blank entries across global data centers.
• Engineers isolated the root cause within ten minutes, but service restoration was delayed by infrastructure overloads in large regions like us-central-1.
• Google's incident report reveals the absence of feature flags and error handling in the new quota-policy checks feature as key factors in the widespread failures.
• The blackout disrupted first-party products such as Gmail, Calendar and Drive in addition to third-party platforms including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify.
• Google has pledged architectural changes to isolate system failures, promising a full operations audit and enhancements to both automated alerts and human communication channels.