Mysterious metadata monster swamped Google’s blobs and crashed its cloud

Google has explained how and why big chunks of its cloud crashed last week, and as is often the case the company broke itself. A Google Cloud Issue Summary [PDF] detailing the root cause of the outage starts by explaining “Many Google services use a common, internal, distributed system for immutable, unstructured data, also …

[Dave_uk]

Tough when things go wrong, but who cares when its Google, not me!

What a shame for the monopoly! Oh, those poor businesses that depend on Google.

Tough, hope the cascade exacerbates. Nice to hear they have an issue. Thanks TheRegister :-)

Your business suffering, tough, use a local independent and stop selling your company's soul.

Google UK were on the News this morning rabbiting on about how they wish to promote LOCAL businesses:

"there has been increased searches for local produce on our search engines, so we wish to promote those businesses..."

What a load of tosh, just out for some free press, the reporter did well with his question:

"But Google could help by paying its fair share of TAX?"

and the Google marketing kid stumbled through with the usual we pay what is required in the country.... bah bah...

[Doctor Syntax]

When it was just disks and memory we used to call it thrashing.

I think there's a law of computing here:

When you build a more complex system by adding layers of indirection you still get the same types of failure but with Murphy also taking advantage of those layers of indirection.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blob

I blame The Blob.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Blob_(1958)_theatrical_poster.jpg

"Indescribable . . . Indestructible! Nothing can stop it!"

[Anon]

Someone finally did it!

Someone googled for Google and it started imploding...

[MatthewSt]

Numbers

I like the way they're reporting the stats as percentage of users that have been active recently. A lot more useful than "some"

[Norman R]

Was it a 1202 program alarm?