What actually broke during the June 2025 Google Cloud outage?
Service Control, the internal gatekeeper that authorizes and rate-limits every API request across Google Cloud, crashed globally. A new quota-checking code path hit a null pointer on malformed policy data, and because that policy data replicates near-instantly across every region, the crash propagated everywhere within seconds instead of staying contained to one region.
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The Google Cloud Outage That Started With One Missing Null CheckOne unprotected code path in Google Cloud's Service Control took down Spotify, Discord, and Cloudflare auth in minutes. Here's the anatomy of the failure.
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