Comment by fidotron
2 days ago
It's completely nuts that Firebase has this: https://status.firebase.google.com/incidents/ZcF1YDUvpdixZ2e...
"Firebase Data Connect unavailable due to a known Google Cloud global outage"
While the Google Cloud status page https://status.cloud.google.com/ says "No major incidents" and everything is green. So Google Cloud know there is an outage but just deem it not major enough to show it.
Edit to add: within 10 minutes of this post Google updated their status page. More curiously the Firebase page I linked to has been edited to remove mention of Google Cloud in the status and now says "Firebase Data Connect is currently experiencing a service disruption. Please check back for status. ".
IIRC status pages drive customer compensation for downtime. Updating it is basically signing the check for their biggest customers, in most similar companies you need a very senior executive to approve the update
On the other side of this, Firebase probably doesn't have money at stake making the update
It is not the status page that drives customer compensation. It is downtime.
The status page is essentially an admission of guilt. It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.
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Nah, its just some client side caching / JS stuff. Clicking the big refresh button fixed it for me, 15 minutes before OP noted it.
(n.b. as much as Google in aggregate is evil, they're smart evil. You can't avoid execs approving every outage because checks without some paper trail, and execs don't want to approve every outage, you'd have to rely on too many engineers and sales people, even as ex-employees, to keep it a secret. disclaimer: xoogler)
(EDIT: for posterity, we're discussing a "overall status" thing with a huge refresh button, right above a huge table chockful of orange triangles that indicate "One or more regions affected" - even when the "overall status" was green, the table was still full of orange and visible immediately underneath. My point being, you gotta suppose a wholeeee bunch of stuff to get to the point there was ever info suppressed, much less suppressed intentionally to avoid cutting checks)
Something must be preventing them updating the status page at this point. Of course they could still deem it not enough, but just from my limited tests, docker, buf, etc (it may not be GCP that is down, but it is quite the coincidence). are outright down. I'd wager that this is much more widespread.
I'm actually on a bridge call with Google Cloud, we're a large customer -- I just learned today that their status page is not automated, instead someone actually manually updates it!
That's the case with every status page. These pages are managed by business people not engineers, because their primary purpose is to show customers that the company is meeting contractually defied SLAs.
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This is actually the norm for status pages. If you look at the various status page offerings you'll see that they're designed around manual updates.
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This feels very much like when facebook, locked themselves out of their datacenters. ;)
* https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/facebook-blames-m...
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The bigger you are, the more you want a human involved in the decision to publicly declare an incident.
That's fairly typical. You want a human in the loop for decisions like that.
Most status pages are manual.
At least some of the information has to be.
The weird part is that it took them almost an full hour to update it.
CF too: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
This extra funny that GCP status page even includes a “last updated” time, which is exactly built to convey possible failure to update in cases like this
No major incident as of “ Last updated time: 12 Jun 2025, 11:48 PDT”
Maybe the outage is preventing them from updating that specific page? Hmm
EDIT: Looks like it has been updated now (6:49 PM UTC)
Anytime there is an outage that affects App Engine, Google can't seem to get their status page updated for an extended period of time.
Almost an hour to update the page...
I hope this is the case, or google is super unreliable for production grade work.
:))))))
I asked testing to see if it was up, and it pointed out that Google shows nothing but Nest is showing an outage right now, lol
https://status.nest.com/posts/dashboard
Maybe their dashboard is hosted on GCP and they are displaying a cached version. :-)
More likely they are unable to update their own status page, but in either case not covering themselves in glory over at GCP right now.
GCP just updated their status
Services are recovering in some locations it seems - Discord is healing
Status pages are PR. It gets the same PR treatment as anything else
AWS has this all the time. If you need to know if a service is down in a region, check for other engineers talking about it on X.
lies, from big tech?
say it's not so!