Cloud Outage Analysis
GCP Outage Cost - Google Cloud History & Real Losses
Updated June 2026 · 7 major incidents documented
GCP Outage History
| Date | Services | Duration | Impact | Est. Customer Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2025 | IAM / Service Control, 100+ products (Compute, BigQuery, Firestore, Vertex AI) | ~3 hours (us-central1 ~7 hours) | Global API auth failures; cascaded to Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, OpenAI | $50M+ est. |
| Oct 2023 | Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Storage | ~6 hours | Multi-region storage degradation | $15M+ est. |
| Jun 2023 | Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner | ~4 hours | Database service disruption | $10M+ est. |
| Nov 2021 | Cloud Networking, VPC | ~3 hours | Networking degradation in multiple regions | $10M+ est. |
| Jun 2019 | Compute Engine, GKE, GCS, YouTube | ~4 hours | Major global disruption affecting YouTube, Gmail, Drive | $50M+ est. |
| Mar 2019 | Cloud Storage (multi-region) | ~2 hours | Global Cloud Storage degradation | $10M+ est. |
| Apr 2016 | Compute Engine (US) | ~4 hours | Significant US compute disruption | $15M+ est. |
Cost figures are aggregate customer-loss estimates from revenue-at-risk modeling; Google does not disclose customer impact and no firm analyst loss estimate has been published for the June 2025 incident. June 2025 root cause and timeline per Google's published incident report. Updated June 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.
Frequently Asked
How reliable is Google Cloud Platform?
GCP has historically had fewer major incidents than AWS us-east-1, but its global control plane means failures scale fast. The June 12, 2025 outage was its most severe in years: an invalid automated quota policy update with blank fields crashed Service Control, breaking IAM authorization for ~3 hours (us-central1 ~7 hours) across 100+ products and cascading to Cloudflare, Spotify, Discord, and OpenAI.
How do GCP SLA credits work?
GCP credits are 10-50% of monthly service fees depending on severity. Compute Engine credits range from 10% (99%-99.95% uptime) to 50% (below 95%). Claims within 30 days. Credits are GCP billing credits, not cash, calculated from service fees - not your revenue loss.