Ask HN: GCP Outage?

86 points by grilledchickenw a day ago

Status page is, as expected, all green, but anyone noticing anything unusual? Services on cloud run timing out for me.

blitzar 21 hours ago

Systems down, heading to the pub.

  • ge96 20 hours ago

    Every time pager duty hits, take a shot

    • mbf 20 hours ago

      I forgot all about pager duty... been retired over a year now. I don't miss pager duty.

      • CoastalCoder 19 hours ago

        > I forgot all about pager duty

        Probably because it's hard to form long-term memories when you're sleep-deprived :/

        • blitzar 19 hours ago

          or 8 shots in

Ironlink 21 hours ago

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.

freedomben 20 hours ago

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)

tosh a day ago

Firebase Firestore is either down or very high latency in us-east1

lebski88 21 hours ago

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.

ghxst a day ago

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.

romanzubenko a day ago

We first noticed google login issues with our app, can't login with google anywhere now, Google Analytics is down as well.

staletofu a day ago

Can't login with google to langsmith at the moment and gcp login is loading either. Seems like there is something afoot.

abhisek 18 hours ago

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 17 hours ago

    I see they made great strides in the past 5 years - it used to take days =)

jeanlucas a day ago

Multiple people in Brazil reporting:

- SSO issues;

- Google workspace tools not loading;

current time: 2025-07-18T15:35:43+00:00 12h35 GMT-3

jeanlucas a day ago

Some issues here in Brazil

  • hu3 19 hours ago

    One of my multi-region clients is also affected by Brazil GCP.

dangoodmanUT 21 hours ago

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)

  • 18172828286177 21 hours ago

    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.

  • romanhn 15 hours ago

    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).

  • jonathaneunice 21 hours ago

    And also that effort(multi cloud) >>> effort(multi region)

  • JohnMakin 20 hours ago

    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 20 hours ago

      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 19 hours ago

      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

      • JohnMakin 13 hours ago

        yes, direct connect I have quite a bit of experience with. The costs add up in weird ways. if you want to spend on it though, multi cloud is extremely resilient, and my preferred architecture if money and talent are no object.

dijit 21 hours ago

Maybe centralising all our IT infrastructure wasn't a good idea after all.

  • kenmacd 20 hours ago

    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.

    • dijit 19 hours ago

      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 18 hours ago

        You need to phrase it as Internet Weather.

        • gsliepen 5 hours ago

          It was an act of Google^H^H^H^Hd.

    • dpkirchner 19 hours ago

      yup. I figure I'm basically a free-rider (except I am paying a relatively small amount.)