Part 7/13:
This crash cascaded globally because Google had already released the new code version across its entire infrastructure. The failure wasn't isolated—it affected all regions simultaneously, including the core API management systems responsible for controlling access and quotas.
The Chain of Events: How the Outage Unfolded
Once the null pointer dereference triggered crashes:
The control planes—which manage API requests—became unresponsive.
The "red button" mechanism, designed as a safety fallback, was employed swiftly by Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to disable the faulty path.
Despite these efforts, the system was overwhelmed due to the breadth of the failure, causing widespread outages in cloud services and downstream platforms.