Google says it is sorry for the cloud outage, flawed updates led to disruption of worldwide services

Google has issued a formal apology following a sweeping outage on Thursday that affected more than 70 of its cloud services and rippled across major tech platforms like OpenAI, Shopify, and Cloudflare. The disruption also impacted Google’s own products including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet.

In an incident report released Friday, Google attributed the failure to “multiple layers of flawed recent updates,” particularly a quota policy feature added in May that was pushed live without sufficient real-world testing. The system began misfiring after receiving blank data entries, triggering cascading failures across all of Google’s global cloud regions.

While engineers identified the core issue within 10 minutes, the full outage lasted over seven hours, especially in larger data centres where system overloads took longer to resolve. Google acknowledged that the new feature was released without feature flags — a standard safeguard that allows gradual rollouts — which would have caught the bug before widespread exposure.

“We deeply apologise for the impact this outage has had,” Google said in its report. “We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian echoed the apology on X, calling the disruption regrettable and reaffirming the company’s focus on reliability. “We have been hard at work on the outage today and we are now fully restored across all regions and products. We regret the disruption this caused our customers,” Kurian said in the post