Policy change with blank fields crashes Google Cloud's Service Control in a global loop (2025)
A policy change containing blank fields was inserted into the quota policy system; when Service Control read it, the code path hit a null pointer and the binaries went into a crash loop.
What happened
- The faulty code lacked error handling and was not protected by a feature flag, so unvetted behaviour reached production globally.Google Cloud incident report: global outage of June 12, 2025
- More than 40 Google Cloud products returned 503 errors between 10:51 and 18:18 PDT.Google Cloud incident report: global outage of June 12, 2025
The failure pattern
Watch the pattern: Global change without a staged rollout
Safeguards that address it
CollectSEA's engineering analysis of what would have prevented or contained this failure.
- Guard risky code paths with feature flagsShip new behaviour dark, enable it gradually and keep a fast way to turn it off.
- Validate policy data before global replicationReject blank or malformed policy fields, handle errors without crashing, and replicate changes region by region.
Related standards
CollectSEA's mapping through this incident's failure pattern; not an official determination by the standards bodies.
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