That time Google Cloud Platform bricked the Internet…

Google Cloud Platform experienced a major outage that affected popular services like Snapchat, Spotify, Discord, and Cloudflare, causing nearly 100% error rates for over 2 hours. The incident was caused by a dormant bug in Google's API management service - a null pointer exception in code that lacked proper error handling. The bug was introduced on May 29th but remained undetected until a policy change on June 12th triggered the faulty code path, causing the API management binary to crash globally. Google took 40 minutes to begin rollback and 4 hours to fully stabilize, potentially costing millions in SLA credits and damaging their reputation in the competitive cloud market.