Part 8/13:
- The herd effect of repeatedly restarting service control components added strain, especially in larger regions like US Central 1, where infrastructure overloads extended repair times to over two hours.
Google acknowledged that the absence of exponential backoff—a standard rate-limiting technique—during restarts exacerbated the issue, leading to resource exhaustion and prolonged downtime.
Response and Recovery
Fortunately, Google's engineers responded rapidly. Within 10 minutes of identifying the root cause, they activated the red button, disabling the defective code path altogether.
The recovery process involved:
Gradually regional reinstatement of services, starting with smaller regions.
Throttling infrastructure restarts to prevent overload.