Why did a single bug take down so many unrelated services?
Service Control sits in front of nearly all Google Cloud API traffic, so anything built on GCP — Spotify, Discord, Shopify, Cloudflare's authentication layer, Vertex AI, BigQuery — depends on it staying up. A shared gatekeeper is a single point of failure by construction: when it goes down, every service behind it fails the same way at the same time, regardless of how unrelated those services are to each other.
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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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