google crashed the internet with a single pointer
Source: YouTube · Low Level · published Jun 16, 2025 · 15:14
The internet experienced a major outage on June 12, 2025, lasting approximately three hours, caused by a null pointer dereference in Google’s service control binary, affecting major services like Google, AWS, and Cloudflare globally 9:00.
Key Takeaways:
• A minor coding error—specifically, a null pointer dereference—triggered a crash in Google’s service control system, which manages API access and quotas 4:24-4:47.
• The bug was introduced in a code change released on May 29, 2025, but only triggered when a policy update added blank (null) fields to regional Spanner tables, which the system failed to handle 9:00-9:26.
• Despite having a "red button" emergency kill switch, the outage persisted due to a lack of exponential backoff, causing a cascading failure across regions like US Central 1 11:00-11:44.
• The incident exposed a critical vulnerability in the internet’s dependence on a few cloud providers, highlighting a systemic single point of failure 12:30-13:32.
Google’s engineering team identified and resolved the issue within 40 minutes, restoring services across all regions, though recovery in large regions took up to 2 hours and 40 minutes 10:19-11:44.
Sources:
- 9:00 Outage timeline and impact on major services
- 4:24-4:47 Explanation of null pointer dereference and crash mechanism
- 9:00-9:26 Policy change causing null field and system failure
- 11:00-11:44 Cascading failure and lack of backoff in recovery
- 12:30-13:32 Critique of internet’s single-point-of-failure design
- 10:19-11:44 Incident response and recovery timeline
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First 800 characters of the transcript
internet had a bit of an oopsie, a bit of a landmine, bit of a mistake that happened that caused a lot of the internet to go down for three hours on Thursday. This site here, Down Detector, this is an image of Down Detector at the time the outage began where a lot of major services that everyone uses like Spotify, Google, AWS, Cloudflare, these huge cloud providers are all seeing outages at the same time, which effectively took down a majority of the internet for about 3 hours at least in the US. Some other services that are downstream affected like Claude for example, Twitch, npm, Dragon Ball randomly were all hit. The the scary part about addages like this is it kind of shows a natural vulnerability in like the design of the internet as we know it. I want to talk about that and how a min…