Comment by somewhatgoated
1 day ago
On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP, unlike AWS/Azure who seem to go down catastrophically a couple of times per year.
1 day ago
On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP, unlike AWS/Azure who seem to go down catastrophically a couple of times per year.
I've been in AWS for almost twenty years at this point. It's been a long time since I've seen a global outage of the data plane on anything. The control plane, especially the US-east-1 services? Yes - but if you're off of east-1, your outages are measured in missile strikes, not botched deployments.
Didn't the latest outage affect people not on us-east-1 because internal aws services depend on us-east-1?
The impacts are usually partial. For example, scaling is impacted but everything already deployed contributes to work up to capacity. Or, you can't change configuration but the previous configuration works as configured. Often surprisingly not so impactful even if there can be limited work stoppage.
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Work for a major bank who isn't solely in US East 1.
No it didn't impact us.
I can easily remember a few multi-hour AWS incidents from the last few years, since I've had to handle the resulting fires at my various employers at those times. Not sure how you missed these, or do they not count as "global outages" for some reason?
December 2021: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/aws-outage-takes-do...
June 2023: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-52
October 2025: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/amazon-web-services-outage-t...
Each of these were massive outages impacting very large services across the web.
Perhaps you don't notice GCP outages because so few companies rely on them?
There is a mobile game I know of that had an outage as a result of a GCP service outage. That is the only time I've noticed GCP outages.
With that said, I would not say few companies rely on GCP. Search for "GCP" in this month's HN hiring thread. There are 23 hits, more than Azure's 21. AWS has 90 hits, which I guess shows its sheer dominance in the startup space. But these figures more or less agree with my intuition of the major clouds being AWS/GCP/Azure.
We rely on them so I would have definitely noticed. Even a couple of minutes and our customers would freak out…
> Perhaps you don't notice GCP outages because so few companies rely on them?
GCP is the world's third largest cloud provider, and has around half of AWS' market share. Claiming no one uses it reads like Yogi Berra's "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded".
Isn't that including things like google workspace and similar? Both Azure and GCP have sometimes included things that most people think of as unrelated SaaS (office 365, gsuite/workspace) to make themselves look bigger in the cloud sector.
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GCP has a lot of customers. But you wouldn't know the companies that do, unless you worked there and wanted to leak it, or it publicly comes out. Eg it's been publicly acknowledged that Apple uses GCP for iCloud, https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-g... , and Home Depot is another that's used as a case study, https://cloud.google.com/customers/the-home-depot but most customers don't want to make a big deal about being on GCP as it's none of our business who's hosting them.
Apple also uses AWS, and I won't be surprised if they also use Azure. Big companies are multicloud, and not because it's a good idea (it rarely is), but because they inherited multiple environments on different CSPs, and maintaining those where they are is often cheaper than migrating them to a different CSP.
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upvoted & favourited because you taught me a really interesting fact which I feel makes up for an amazing discussion (regarding icloud using GCP).
also, I can't help but imagine if instead of render, it was Apple's account which could've been auto-banned (Render is almost a billion dollar company or series-B, I am not sure)
I haven't read the articles and I admit that but can you please elaborate to me on why Apple uses GCP themselves for idrive, I would love to know the technical decisions behind it on a genuinely curious level.
From my (let's face it) limited understanding of GCP, it isn't particularly good or price performant and one of the wonders is that Google sells it directly with Google photos too and an competitive lineup at android.
So in some sense if Apple is using gcp's for icloud then aren't they just reselling google storage themselves and google can always beat them in pricing while also wanting to chew away at the percentage of iphones themselves too?
I mean, I can still try to understand the google search pays apple 10 billion dollars (right?) deal but I don't quite understand why apple would pick GCP when the hosting market is one of the more competitive ones with lots of companies.
I would love to get some explainations or theories as to why exactly is that the case
(Also given its HN, if anyone from apple is reading or knows the answer, I would love that too!)
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Spotify, Ebay, Paypal, Apple, Walmart, Uber are huge users. Lots of other big named companies are big users that I don't think are public.
Then there's Anthropic...huge user.
Snap, for like 15 years at this point: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/snap-maintains-up...
GCP never goes down because they banned all their customers.
A funny meme but just untrue
GCP has had outages. From a quick search it looks like they had a global outage less than a year ago:
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...
AWS goes down catastrophically but are back up in minutes/hours most of the time (as long as they aren't down because Iran blew up their data center). That's obviously REALLY bad for certain industries, but I suspect for the vast majority of their customers it's not a big deal. We've been able to isolate the damage almost every time just by having AZ failover in place and avoiding us-east-1 where we can.
Failover is supposed to protect you every time, unless something really exceptional happens.
While its possible to to isolate the effects, judging by how many things stop working when there is an AWS failure a lot of people fail to do that. I think the shit of responsibility to AWS removes the incentive to put effort into resilience against AWS failure.
> AWS goes down catastrophically but are back up in minutes/hours most of the time
The outage in the linked article appears to have been resolved in 4-5 hours.
IIRC the Paris datacenter flood took down a whole “region” and some data was permanently unrecoverable.
>On the other hand i can’t remember when there was a serious outage on GCP
They had a really bad global outage a year ago. At least with AWS outages are contained to a single region.
You can't have 100% uptime. It's unfeasible, especially for a startup. You should be telling your customers that downtime might happen, sometimes for reasons beyond your control, and that if it does then you'll do your best to recover and to compensate them for the inconvenience. You should cultivate a relationship with your early customers that makes them feel bad for you when there's an outage rather than angry about how it impacts them. Maybe even go as far as firing the customers who give you a hard time over it. That way if your cloud provider falls over it's really annoying but not a big deal.
Your cloud provider blocking your business from running is far worse.
None of the AWS “outages” have impacted us. They have either been regional, in which case we stand down the region (we run multiple hot regions), or didn’t involve things we need to maintain operation.
I can’t imagine AWS ever doing such a cascading delete. I mean, they have made deletion protection a difficult thing to ignore even for individual resources.
Unfortunately, if everyone goes down people are understanding. If just _you_ go down, then its oddly less forgiveable.
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How is blackhole-ing a customer not considered an outage?
I still remember the one where they nuked all the storage of I think an Australian insurance company I think, luckily the it department had done a multi cloud setup for backups
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/google-cloud-ac...
https://archive.is/Q9b5l
There was a pretty bad one last summer - their IAM system got a bad update and it broke almost all GCP services for an hour or so, since every authenticated API call reaches out to IAM.
It had lasting effects for us for a little over 3 hours.
You can read the parent post, right?