[HN Gopher] Ask HN: GCP Outage?
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       Ask HN: GCP Outage?
        
       Status page is, as expected, all green, but anyone noticing
       anything unusual? Services on cloud run timing out for me.
        
       Author : grilledchickenw
       Score  : 83 points
       Date   : 2025-07-18 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
       | staletofu wrote:
       | Can't login with google to langsmith at the moment and gcp login
       | is loading either. Seems like there is something afoot.
        
       | jeanlucas wrote:
       | Some issues here in Brazil
        
         | hu3 wrote:
         | One of my multi-region clients is also affected by Brazil GCP.
        
       | tosh wrote:
       | Firebase Firestore is either down or very high latency in us-
       | east1
        
       | ghxst wrote:
       | Multiple people within our company reporting issues. Mostly from
       | US, us in the EU still seem fine as of right now.
       | 
       | edit: Never mind, it's down for me now as well.
        
       | archiolidius wrote:
       | YouTube API partially down
        
       | romanzubenko wrote:
       | We first noticed google login issues with our app, can't login
       | with google anywhere now, Google Analytics is down as well.
        
       | jeanlucas wrote:
       | Multiple people in Brazil reporting:
       | 
       | - SSO issues;
       | 
       | - Google workspace tools not loading;
       | 
       | current time: 2025-07-18T15:35:43+00:00 12h35 GMT-3
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/oFcAZT...
        
       | dondraper36 wrote:
       | https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/8cY8jdUpEGGbsSMSQk...
       | 
       | Seems to be some hardware problem at least in us-east1
        
         | jbreckmckye wrote:
         | Someone unplugged the Big Router
        
       | palcu wrote:
       | There is an external incident now.
       | 
       | https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/8cY8jdUpEGGbsSMSQk...
        
       | lebski88 wrote:
       | Our VPN restarted about an hour ago and caused a bit of
       | excitement, on the whole it's been a lot less _interesting_ than
       | the last one thankfully.
        
       | dangoodmanUT wrote:
       | Reminder that multi cloud >>> multi region
       | 
       | Anyone who says otherwise is selling availability theater
       | 
       | Too many whole-cloud outages due to a bad config in the last 2
       | months (GCP x2, cloudflare x2)
        
         | jonathaneunice wrote:
         | And also that effort(multi cloud) >>> effort(multi region)
        
         | 18172828286177 wrote:
         | This isn't a whole-cloud outage. It's not even a whole-region
         | outage.
         | 
         | Whole-cloud outages are pretty damn rare. The recent GCP issues
         | are an exception to the general rule.
         | 
         | I'd posit that the complexity of a multi-cloud setup is
         | generally going to reduce your service's reliability more than
         | relying on a single cloud does.
        
           | remram wrote:
           | Whole-zone outages are also rare...
        
             | FrankPetrilli wrote:
             | "Rarity" is a distinction without merit in this particular
             | case; the important thing to note is that (most) clouds
             | don't guarantee _any_ availability of a single zone. A
             | system which stashes all of its infrastructure in one zone
             | only is expected to be impacted by issues with that cloud,
             | while a multi-zone setup spanning a region is generally
             | "soft-guaranteed" to be resilient to normal operations /
             | failures.
        
               | remram wrote:
               | > (most) clouds don't guarantee _any_ availability of a
               | single zone
               | 
               | Really?
               | 
               | AWS (EC2) does: https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/?did=s
               | la_card&trk=sla_car... so does GCP (GCE):
               | https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla?hl=en and so does
               | OVH: https://us.ovhcloud.com/legal/sla/public-cloud/
               | 
               | Are none of those three part of "most clouds"? What cloud
               | platform do you use?
        
           | dangoodmanUT wrote:
           | Not about regions, it's about services
        
         | JohnMakin wrote:
         | I've maintained a large multi-cloud architecture in the past.
         | The problem is they really hit you hard on egress costs. Of
         | course the motivation is obvious, they want to keep you locked
         | in to their vendor. I did like that it gave a stronger leverage
         | in contract renewals, but that was about it. The IAC was much
         | more complicated and required more people/areas of knowledge.
         | So it's definitely a tradeoff.
         | 
         | You are correct that it's "better" though if your goal is to
         | have as many 9's of uptime as possible.
        
           | mads_quist wrote:
           | I currently have the strong opinion that for many mid-sized
           | orgs with 250+ engineers it can be more resilient if you go
           | back to bare metal or at least VM only in two or three local
           | date centers. Yes, you need to know that they do their job
           | well. But it will probably also reduce a lot of devops
           | overhead...
        
           | dilyevsky wrote:
           | There are multiple companies that help you with that by
           | running tunnels via Direct Interconnect (Direct Connect in
           | AWS) so that you "only" pay 2c/G egressing data out of VPC
           | via this tunnel
        
         | romanhn wrote:
         | I worked at PagerDuty, so definitely not selling availability
         | theater. We did multi-cloud / multi-region for many years, and
         | the story is not so simple. Development is all about trade-
         | offs, and deciding what risk you are OK with. Multi-cloud
         | provided a relatively small amount of value (given how
         | incredibly unlikely whole-cloud outages are, even full-region
         | outages are quite rare) at the expense of 2x implementation
         | overhead, 2x exposure to random cloud-specific operational
         | events, and the need to develop for the common denominator of
         | functionality, which leaves out a LOT of interesting cloud
         | offerings. In the end, it ended up just not being worth it, and
         | moving to the single-cloud multi-region config provided enough
         | reliability even for the company where reliability is the
         | primary differentiator.
         | 
         | In my current job as a technical due diligence advisor, I
         | frequently recommend multi-AZ setup but specifically not multi-
         | region, because the former is easy and worthwhile while the
         | latter carries a lot more operational overhead (you become much
         | more sensitive to various latencies and network jitters) and
         | you now need to think about things like synchronous vs async
         | replication, etc. Much better to focus dev effort on the
         | product, rather than eke out an additional .001% of
         | availability (unless availability is a super critical
         | component).
        
       | Ironlink wrote:
       | Our system in EU observed some slowness and a few 500 and 503
       | responses from `identitytoolkit.googleapis.com` over a period of
       | about 10 minutes.
        
       | blitzar wrote:
       | Systems down, heading to the pub.
        
         | ge96 wrote:
         | Every time pager duty hits, take a shot
        
           | mbf wrote:
           | I forgot all about pager duty... been retired over a year
           | now. I don't miss pager duty.
        
             | CoastalCoder wrote:
             | > I forgot all about pager duty
             | 
             | Probably because it's hard to form long-term memories when
             | you're sleep-deprived :/
        
               | blitzar wrote:
               | or 8 shots in
        
       | dijit wrote:
       | Maybe centralising all our IT infrastructure wasn't a good idea
       | after all.
        
         | kenmacd wrote:
         | I dunno. If just your employers site is down then you'll be
         | expected to fix it, whereas if everyone is down there's less
         | pressure.
        
           | dpkirchner wrote:
           | yup. I figure I'm basically a free-rider (except I am paying
           | a relatively small amount.)
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | Nobody who talks to actual stakeholders can use this as a
           | defence.
           | 
           | B2B customers don't care if the other sites are also down,
           | your SLA is affected with them, and they will want
           | compensation.
        
             | hadlock wrote:
             | You need to phrase it as Internet Weather.
        
       | freedomben wrote:
       | Definitely been seeing a handful of 50x errors this morning.
       | Fortunately seems like a partial outage but definitely annoying
       | (and can sometimes indicate worse trouble coming)
        
       | abhisek wrote:
       | Yes. Many times. Kubernetes upgrade during maintenance schedule
       | borks up entire cluster, yet everything is green on status page.
       | Support case under enterprise support plan took almost 6 hours to
       | get it resolved.
        
         | dilyevsky wrote:
         | I see they made great strides in the past 5 years - it used to
         | take days =)
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-18 23:01 UTC)