Google Cloud and Workspace global outage, 12 June 2025
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1SsW
Method
"This code change and binary release went through our region by region rollout, but the code path that failed was never exercised during this rollout due to needing a policy change that would trigger the code... The issue with this change was that it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected."
Population
"Google Cloud, Google Workspace and Google Security Operations products experienced increased 503 errors in external API requests, impacting customers."
What it does not show
Self-reported without independent audit. Does not quantify how many other unflagged latent code paths exist. Read carefully this is not evidence that flags cause incidents but that flag and staged-rollout discipline has to be enforced rather than merely available.
Google Cloud
The inverse case: a code path shipped WITHOUT a flag sat globally live-but-dormant for about two weeks, and when an unrelated policy change activated it everywhere at once it crashed Service Control worldwide, taking down 50+ services. Google’s own remediation was to make flags mandatory — to “enforce all changes to critical binaries to be feature flag protected and disabled by default”.
Tier III: Single-incident postmortem with a detailed internal timeline, self-reported by the party responsible; no comparison group.