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Pankaj Singh for forgecode

Posted on • Originally published at forgecode.dev

When Google Sneezes, the Whole World Catches a Cold!

TL;DR

Google Cloud's global IAM service glitched on June 12th at 10:50 AM PT, causing authentication failures across dozens of GCP products. Cloudflare's Workers KV which depends on a Google hosted backing store followed suit, knocking out Access, WARP and other Zero Trust features. Anthropic, which runs on GCP, lost file uploads and saw elevated error rates. Seven and a half hours later, full mitigations were complete and all services recovered. Let’s unpack the chain reaction.

google

1. Timeline at a Glance

Time (PT) Signal What We Saw
10:51 Internal alerts GCP SRE receives spikes in 5xx from IAM endpoints
11:05 DownDetector User reports for Gmail, Drive, Meet skyrocket
11:19 Cloudflare status “Investigating widespread Access failures”
11:25 Anthropic status Image and file uploads disabled to cut error volume
12:12 Cloudflare update Root cause isolated to third‑party KV dependency
12:41 Google update Mitigation rolled out to IAM fleet, most regions healthy
13:30 Cloudflare green Access, KV and WARP back online worldwide
14:05 Anthropic green Full recovery, Claude stable
15:16 Google update Most GCP products fully recovered as of 13:45 PDT
16:13 Google update Residual impact on Dataflow, Vertex AI, PSH only
17:10 Google update Dataflow fully resolved except us-central1
17:33 Google update Personalized Service Health impact resolved
18:18 Google final Vertex AI Online Prediction fully recovered, all clear
18:27 Google postmortem Internal investigation underway, analysis to follow

2. What Broke Inside Google Cloud

Google

GCP’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the front door every API call must pass. When the fleet that issues and validates OAuth and service account tokens misbehaves, the blast radius reaches storage, compute, control planes essentially everything.

GCP status page Figure 1: GCP status page during the first hour

2.1 Suspected Trigger

  • Google’s initial incident summary refers to an IAM back‑end rollout issue indicating that a routine update to the IAM service introduced an error that spread before standard canary checks could catch it.
  • Engineers inside Google reportedly rolled back the binary and purged bad configs, then forced token cache refresh across regions. us‑central1 lagged behind because it hosts quorum shards for IAM metadata.

2.2 Customer Impact Checklist

checklist

  • Cloud Storage: 403 and 500 errors on signed URL fetches
  • Cloud SQL and Bigtable: auth failures on connection open
  • Workspace: Gmail, Calendar, Meet intermittently 503
  • Vertex AI, Dialogflow, Apigee: elevated latency, then traffic drops

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3. Cloudflare’s Dependency Chain Reaction

Cloudflare’s Workers KV stores billions of key‑value entries and replicates them across 270+ edge locations. The hot path is in Cloudflare’s own data centers, but the persistent back‑end is a multi‑region database hosted on Google Cloud. When IAM refused new tokens, Writes and eventually Reads to the backing store timed out.

Cloudflare status Figure 2: Cloudflare status excerpt highlighting Access, KV and WARP as degraded

3.1 Domino Effects

  • Cloudflare Access uses KV to store session state -> login loops
  • WARP stores Zero Trust device posture in KV -> client could not handshake
  • Durable Objects (SQLite) relied on KV for metadata -> subset of DOs failed
  • AI Gateway and Workers AI experienced cold‑start errors due to missing model manifests in KV

Cloudflare’s incident commander declared a Code Orange their highest severity and spun up a cross‑vendor bridge with Google engineers. Once IAM mitigation took hold, KV reconnected and the edge quickly self‑healed.

4. Anthropic Caught in the Crossfire

Anthropic

Anthropic hosts Claude on GCP. The immediate failure mode was file upload (hits Cloud Storage) and image vision features, while raw text prompts sometimes succeeded due to cached tokens.

[12:07 PT] status.anthropic.com: "We have disabled uploads to reduce error volume while the upstream GCP incident is in progress. Text queries remain available though elevated error rates persist."

Anthropic throttled traffic to keep the service partially usable, then restored uploads after Google’s IAM fleet was stable.

5. Lessons for Engineers

Lessons

  1. Control plane failures hurt more than data plane faults. Data replication across zones cannot save you if auth is down.
  2. Check hidden dependencies. Cloudflare is multi‑cloud at the edge, yet a single‑vendor choice deep in the stack still cascaded.
  3. Status pages must be fast and honest. Google took nearly an hour to flip the incident flag. Customers were debugging ghosts meanwhile.
  4. Design an emergency bypass. If your auth proxy (Cloudflare Access) fails, can you temporarily route around it?
  5. Chaos drills still matter. Rare multi‑provider events happen and the playbooks must be rehearsed.

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6. Still Waiting for the Full RCAs

rca

Google will publish a postmortem once internal review wraps expect details on the faulty rollout, scope of blast radius and planned guardrails.
Cloudflare traditionally ships a forensic blog within a week. Watch for specifics on Workers KV architecture and new redundancy layers.

sweat Figure 3: What every SRE did for two hours straight - Refresh.Sweat.Repeat

7. Updated Analysis: What Google's Official Timeline Tells Us

Google's detailed incident timeline reveals several important details not visible from external monitoring:

7.1 Root Cause Identification

  • 12:41 PDT: Google engineers identified root cause and applied mitigations
  • 13:16 PDT: Infrastructure recovered in all regions except us-central1
  • 14:00 PDT: Mitigation implemented for us-central1 and multi-region/us

The fact that us-central1 lagged significantly behind suggests this region hosts critical infrastructure components that require special handling during recovery operations.

7.2 Phased Recovery Pattern

  1. Infrastructure Layer (12:41-13:16): Underlying dependency fixed globally except one region
  2. Product Layer (13:45): Most GCP products recovered, some residual impact
  3. Specialized Services (17:10-18:18): Complex services like Dataflow and Vertex AI required additional time

7.3 The Long Tail Effect

Even after the root cause was fixed, some services took 5+ additional hours to fully recover:

  • Dataflow: Backlog clearing in us-central1 until 17:10 PDT
  • Vertex AI: Model Garden 5xx errors persisted until 18:18 PDT
  • Personalized Service Health: Delayed updates until 17:33 PDT

This demonstrates how cascading failures create recovery debt that extends far beyond the initial fix.

google

8. Wrap Up

At 10:50 AM a bug in a single Google Cloud service took down authentication worldwide. Within half an hour that failure reached Cloudflare and Anthropic. By 1:30 PM everything was green again, but not before reminding the internet just how tangled our dependencies are.

Keep an eye out for the official RCAs. Meanwhile, update your incident playbooks, test your failovers and remember that sometimes the cloud’s biggest danger is a bad config on a Tuesday.

Let me know you take on this in the comment section below!!

Top comments (20)

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dotallio profile image
Dotallio

Reading this really hammers home how much hidden risk is buried deep in cloud dependencies, even for 'multi-cloud' setups. Curious if you've seen any team actually simulate this kind of auth/control plane outage for real?

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh • Edited

Great point!! very few teams simulate control plane or IAM outages at this scale. Most chaos drills focus on app or data plane. This incident might finally push teams to test deeper dependencies.

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nathan_tarbert profile image
Nathan Tarbert

the sheer scale of this is kinda humbling, honestly. i’ve enjoyed all the research you’ve put into this, it adds up
you ever feel like there’s no amount of redundancy that’s truly enough when so much rides on one vendor?

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Totally feel that, when one vendor goes down and everything topples, it really exposes how fragile even “redundant” systems can be. Appreciate you reading and engaging!

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kurealnum profile image
Oscar

Feels like the decentralized web gets a little bit more centralized every day. I can't even fathom how much tech runs on Google/AWS servers.

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0xlynett profile image
lynett.eth

It really sucks. Not only that, it's really expensive

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Agreed Lynett!!!

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Lord Google!!!!! Btw Thanks for reading.

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arshtechpro profile image
ArshTechPro

great

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Thanks Arsh!!

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kanchan_negi_12ef486e0c55 profile image
kanchan negi

Quite in-depth Analysis!!!

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Thanks for reading!!!

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nadeem_zia_257af7e986ffc6 profile image
nadeem zia

Looks really good, thanks for info

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Thanks for reading Nadeem!!!

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Nube Colectiva

🔥

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Thanks Nube!!!

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emboe profile image
Emily

Good info!

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Thanks Emily!!

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AI Marketing List

Amazing!

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pankaj_singh_1022ee93e755 profile image
Pankaj Singh

Thanks!!!

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