What took Google hours to fix a glitch that its engineers “identified in 10 minutes”

Google has apologised for a major outage recently that impacted services running on Google Cloud across the globe recently. The widespread outage disrupted over 70 Google Cloud services, bringing down major third-party platforms like Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Shopify, as well as Google’s own products, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Meet.

In an incident report released late Friday (June 17), the company said, “Google Cloud, Google Workspace and Google Security Operations products experienced increased 503 errors in external API requests, impacting customers.” Google attributed the hours-long downtime to a series of flawed updates, particularly a new “quota policy checks” feature introduced in May.