Why did recovery take almost 3 hours in one region when others recovered in 40 minutes?
The us-central1 region hit a 'herd effect': once the kill switch fixed the underlying bug, every crashed Service Control instance tried to restart at the same moment, all hammering the same Spanner database for policy metadata simultaneously. Without randomized exponential backoff on the restarts, the recovery attempt itself became a second, self-inflicted overload.
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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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