Cloud Outage Analysis
GCP Outage History - Google Cloud Outages & Real Losses
Updated August 2026 · 7 major incidents documented
GCP Outage History, In Brief
Google Cloud has had at least 7 major documented outages since 2016, and 4 of the 7 were global or all-region events - a consequence of GCP's global control plane. The most recent major incident was June 12, 2025, when an invalid automated quota policy update with blank fields crashed Service Control and broke IAM authorization globally for about 3 hours (us-central1 about 7 hours), hitting dozens of products and cascading to Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, and OpenAI. The longest single event was April 2023, when a water leak and battery fire at a Paris data center took the entire europe-west9 region offline for more than 24 hours, with some services degraded for weeks. The June 2, 2019 network-congestion outage lasted about 4 hours and took YouTube, Gmail, Snapchat, and Discord down across US regions, and the famous April 11, 2016 event dropped all Compute Engine connectivity worldwide for 18 minutes. GCP has fewer major incidents than AWS us-east-1, but they scale worldwide fast. Full chronology and SLA credit math below.
GCP Outage & Downtime Statistics
7
Major outages since 2016
~1/yr
Frequency (2019-2026)
4 / 7
Global / all-region scope
24h+
Longest (Apr 2023, Paris zone)
~3h
Most recent major (Jun 2025)
Frequency reflects the 7 major incidents documented in the chronology below, not every status-page event. Scope counts documented major outages: 4 of 7 (Jun 2025, Nov 2021, Mar 2019, Apr 2016) were global or all-region; the others were confined to one region (Apr 2023, Jun 2023) or a cluster of US regions (Jun 2019). Google has had smaller incidents not listed here.
GCP Outage History
| Date | Region | Services | Duration | Impact | Est. Customer Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2025 | Global | Service Control / IAM; dozens of products (BigQuery, Firestore, Vertex AI, Gmail, Drive) | ~3 hours (us-central1 ~7 hours) | Global API auth failures; cascaded to Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, OpenAI | $50M+ est. |
| Apr 2023 | europe-west9 (Paris) | GCE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, BigQuery (data-center water leak + fire) | Zone offline 24h+ (~4-5h peak) | Entire French region down; some services degraded for weeks | $15M+ est. |
| Jun 2023 | us-east5 | IAM auth; Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, Pub/Sub | ~49 minutes | Regional auth failures across data services | $5M+ est. |
| Nov 2021 | Global (Cloud LB) | Cloud Load Balancing (config error) | ~2 hours | Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, Etsy hit by 404s | $20M+ est. |
| Jun 2019 | US multi-region | Network congestion; Compute, GCS, YouTube, Gmail | ~4 hours | Elevated packet loss; YouTube, Gmail, Snapchat, Discord | $50M+ est. |
| Mar 2019 | Global (all regions) | Cloud Storage (internal blob storage) | ~4 hours | GCS + Gmail/Photos attachments degraded (<6% error rate) | $15M+ est. |
| Apr 2016 | Global (all regions) | Compute Engine (external connectivity) | 18 minutes | All GCE instances lost inbound connectivity after a bad IP config rollback | $5M+ est. |
Dates, durations, root causes, and affected services are taken from Google's published incident reports (status.cloud.google.com) and contemporaneous reporting (The Register, DCD, ThousandEyes). Cost figures are aggregate customer-loss estimates from revenue-at-risk modeling, scaled by each outage's duration and breadth; Google does not disclose customer impact and no firm analyst loss estimate has been published for these events. Use the calculator to model your own exposure. Updated August 2026.
GCP SLA Credit Rules
| Monthly Uptime % | Compute Engine Credit | GKE Credit |
|---|---|---|
| 99.95%+ | No credit (SLA met) | No credit |
| 99% - 99.95% | 10% | 10% |
| 95% - 99% | 25% | 25% |
| <95% | 50% | 50% |
Credits applied as GCP billing credits. Claims within 30 days. Full credit vs loss analysis.