Cases3 cases

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1. IL-0366 Cloud Storage uploads and writes in us-central1 slowed and failed with HTTP 503 as traffic piled onto a few backends

   Google Cloud2026

   Symptoms

   From 04:00 US/Pacific on 8 October 2026, Google Cloud Storage upload and write operations in the us-central1 region became slow and failed. Clients mostly saw HTTP 503 UNAVAILABLE errors on WriteObject operations and client-side timeouts.

   High latencyHigh error rateLoad imbalance

   Trigger

   A configuration update to the Cloud Storage load balancing layer turned on a traffic sorting optimization that was meant to deal with local capacity constraints. The recurrence on 9 October came from an incomplete rollback of an upload planner feature.

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   Object storageDatabase

   Contributing factor

   No headroomOverlapping failures

   Detection

   Google engineering teams monitoring system telemetry detected the problem at 04:50 US/Pacific on 8 October, 50 minutes after it began.

   Remediation

   • Drained traffic from the most overloaded storage backend nodes
   • Deployed a configuration change that disabled the traffic sorting optimization
   • Rolled back a recent update to the metadata database service
   • Redirected traffic and drained affected storage components again during the recurrence
   • Fully reverted the load balancing configuration change, restoring capacity-aware routing
   • Returned the drained nodes to service once resource use was back to normal

   Action items

   • Validate load balancing logic changes in smaller regions before rolling them out to large, highly utilized regions
   • Make the storage load balancing enforce capacity constraints so traffic cannot bypass pre-spilling safeguards
   • Speed up internal data movement within highly utilized storage cells to absorb temporary load spikes

   View case
2. IL-0235 Azure OpenAI GPT-5.2 returned HTTP 400 in seven regions after a configuration update the model engine did not support

   Microsoft Azure2026

   Symptoms

   From 23:20 UTC on 9 March 2026 Azure OpenAI Service customers received HTTP 400 and HTTP 429 error responses for the GPT-5.2 model in Australia East, Central US, East US 2, Korea Central, Norway East, Sweden Central and UK South. All other GPT models kept working.

   High error rateLoad imbalance

   Trigger

   An update to the Azure OpenAI GPT-5.2 model enabled feature settings meant to improve service efficiency and resilience. The model engine version running in production did not yet support those settings. The update was rolled out to the whole fleet in stages under Safe Deployment Practices.

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   Model inference serverModel request routing

   Contributing factor

   Unrepresentative stagingMonitoring blind spotOverlapping failures

   Detection

   Service monitoring detected the issue at 00:19 UTC on 10 March, about an hour after impact began. Detection was late because monitoring was set up for client-side HTTP 400 errors and not for service-side anomalies.

   Remediation

   • Rolled back the GPT-5.2 configuration in all affected regions instead of waiting for a hotfix
   • Completed the routing updates and restored full regional capacity information so traffic was spread normally again

   Action items

   • Train engineers on the operating procedures, including which scenarios can be rolled back quickly
   • Store a cached known-good version of the traffic routing details for when the capacity service cannot provide current data
   • Set thresholds for service-side HTTP 400 errors in monitoring
   • Improve anomaly detection on HTTP 4xx errors to alert on unusual error rates below the usual thresholds
   • Add signals to the deployment systems so problematic rollouts stop automatically
   • Make sure early rollout stages have enough backend model instances to catch such problems

   View case
3. IL-0283 Cloudflare's core proxy returned HTTP 5xx across its network after loading an oversized Bot Management feature file

   Cloudflare2025

   Symptoms

   From about 11:20 UTC on 18 November 2025, Cloudflare's network started failing to deliver core traffic, and Internet users visiting Cloudflare customers' sites got an error page that pointed to a failure inside Cloudflare's network. The volume of HTTP 5xx responses served by the network jumped far above its normal low baseline.

   High error rateService outageHigh latencyResponse quality degradation

   Trigger

   At 11:05 UTC Cloudflare deployed a ClickHouse access control change that made users' existing implicit access to the underlying tables in the r0 database explicit, so the metadata of those tables became visible in system tables such as system.columns. The change was being rolled out gradually across the cluster.

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   DatabaseCDN and edge network

   Contributing factor

   Unverified assumptionPartial rolloutNo staged rolloutNo configuration testsOverlapping failuresRetry storm

   Detection

   The first automated test detected the issue at 11:31 UTC, three minutes after the first errors on customer HTTP traffic at 11:28. Manual investigation started at 11:32 and the incident call was created at 11:35.

   Remediation

   • Bypassed the core proxy for Workers KV and Access so they fell back to a prior proxy version, which reduced their impact
   • Stopped the automatic creation and deployment of new Bot Management feature files
   • Inserted a known good feature file into the distribution queue and deployed it globally
   • Forced a restart of the core proxy
   • Scaled control plane concurrency to clear the backlog of dashboard logins
   • Restarted the remaining services that had entered a bad state

   Action items

   • Harden the ingestion of Cloudflare-generated configuration files the same way as user-generated input
   • Enable more global kill switches for features
   • Stop core dumps and other error reports from being able to overwhelm system resources
   • Review the failure modes for error conditions across all core proxy modules

   View case

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