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Hello and welcome to Cloud Crunch, where we unpack the wildest moments in tech history. Today: the day Google Cloud Platform nearly bricked the Internet.
On June 2, 2019, a routine network configuration change in GCP’s us-east1 region went horribly wrong. In an instant, Google’s DNS service stopped answering queries—and with it went access to Spotify, Discord, Nest, Snapchat, Twitch and countless other apps. As Google later explained, “an overly aggressive prefix-filtering rule inadvertently removed healthy routes,” causing traffic to grind to a halt.
Engineers raced against the clock, first rolling back the faulty rule and then deploying a “bump-in-the-wire” workaround to restore connectivity. Within three hours, 90 percent of affected services were back online. But the damage was done: for millions of users, the internet simply stopped working.
This outage reminded everyone that at the heart of our global digital playground lies a house of cards—one small misstep can ripple across continents. So the next time you hit refresh, spare a thought for the unseen configurations that keep us all online. Thanks for listening to Cloud Crunch.
Link to Article
Hello and welcome to Cloud Crunch, where we unpack the wildest moments in tech history. Today: the day Google Cloud Platform nearly bricked the Internet.
On June 2, 2019, a routine network configuration change in GCP’s us-east1 region went horribly wrong. In an instant, Google’s DNS service stopped answering queries—and with it went access to Spotify, Discord, Nest, Snapchat, Twitch and countless other apps. As Google later explained, “an overly aggressive prefix-filtering rule inadvertently removed healthy routes,” causing traffic to grind to a halt.
Engineers raced against the clock, first rolling back the faulty rule and then deploying a “bump-in-the-wire” workaround to restore connectivity. Within three hours, 90 percent of affected services were back online. But the damage was done: for millions of users, the internet simply stopped working.
This outage reminded everyone that at the heart of our global digital playground lies a house of cards—one small misstep can ripple across continents. So the next time you hit refresh, spare a thought for the unseen configurations that keep us all online. Thanks for listening to Cloud Crunch.
Link to Article