Update: Google published some more details about the incident in the Google Cloud Status Dashboard.
As it turned out, the Google User ID Service that handles authentication credentials for OAuth tokens and cookies detected outdated data. Google was migrating the Service to a new quota system.
While they applied a change in October to register the User ID Service with the new quota system, some parts of the previous quota system were left in place. This resulted in incorrect reports on the usage for the User ID Service as 0. An existing grace period on enforcing these quota restrictions delayed the impact, but it eventually expired and triggered the automated quota systems to decrease the quota allowed for the User ID service.
They just did. Google followed in AWS footsteps and let a portion of their key services to go down. Google products – YouTube, Google Image Search, Google Analytics and the whole Google Workspace package (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sheets, Docs, Slides and others) were inaccessible globally.
We identified the main culprit – Google OAuth service, which is used to access Google products and access to many major apps like Asana, HubSpot, Discord, Slack, Figma, Monday.com and many others. If your organization is reliant on one of these products, you were left barehanded without the tools needed to do your work. CAST AI uses several independent services to log in to our platform, including Google OAuth and others, precisely to eliminate the risk of one sign-in tool being unavailable.
Engineers usually joke that if Google goes down, the internet goes down. That’s how tightly knit the two are. But that proves the cost of over-relying on cloud native applications and services from just a single cloud provider. For startups and enterprises alike, today’s reliance on Google will cost many millions of dollars. The cloud leviathan will survive, the companies will have to recoup on their own.
This time it was OAuth. Next time it could be Compute, Network, Storage, and other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) related services. Complete dependence on one cloud provider puts your business in danger of being taken down together with Google, AWS or Azure.
“A cloud failure should not become a disaster. Never again.” said Laurent Gil, CPO and Co-Founder at CAST AI. “You can rest easy knowing that your infrastructure is never down.” Companies have to take back control and have a multi-cloud disaster recovery and fail-over strategy. This way, Asana, HubSpot, Discord, Slack, Figma, and Monday.com at least can know that their users are left unscathed.
CAST AI empowers companies to run applications on multi cloud, and automatically shifts resources to Azure or AWS when Google Cloud has troubles. Don’t let your cloud consumption be affected by a single cloud company.
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