Google Cloud status

How we check Google Cloud

We watch storage.googleapis.com from all five of our probe regions, every 2 minutes. A region that sees a failure does not make this page say "down" on its own: a second region has to agree first, the same confirmation rule every YoPingMe monitor uses.

Google Cloud is dozens of independently operated services, so no single URL proves the whole platform is up. We watch Cloud Storage instead of the marketing site, the same reasoning as watching S3 for AWS - it is the primitive underneath the most other GCP services, and we pin the specific response an anonymous request receives rather than assuming a 2xx.

What is Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is a collection of independently run products, not a single system, spanning compute, storage, databases, networking, and machine learning infrastructure under one console and one billing account. That structure matters before treating any single check of "Google Cloud" as meaningful, because the platform mostly fails one product or one region at a time rather than as a whole.

Cloud Storage is the closest thing GCP has to a shared foundation, which is why this page watches it instead of the marketing site or the console. A large share of what runs on Google Cloud touches object storage somewhere in its path, which makes it a more honest signal of whether the platform's infrastructure is broadly reachable than a page that only describes the company. It remains one service among many, and it says nothing definitive about Compute Engine, BigQuery, or anything else running on its own.

Regional and zonal isolation is the second property worth understanding. Most applications run in a handful of regions rather than all of them, and Google Cloud's own architecture treats zones within a region as largely independent failure domains by design. An incident affecting one zone or one region leaves the rest of the platform untouched, which is why two teams can report entirely different experiences during the same announced event without either being wrong.

Quota and permission errors are the most common source of trouble that gets mistaken for an outage. Every GCP API enforces limits scoped to a project, and crossing one produces an error from a service that remains completely healthy. The same is true of IAM: a permission that was tightened during unrelated security work will produce access-denied errors that look exactly like a platform failure and have nothing to do with one. Both are configuration questions, not incidents, and neither will ever appear on a status page because nothing is actually down.

The practical approach to depending on Google Cloud is to treat availability as scoped to the product and region actually in use, not as one number for the whole platform. The Google Cloud Status Dashboard reports incidents at that granularity and is the authoritative source during any real event. What an external probe against one foundational service adds is an independent baseline that keeps running whether or not Google has published an update yet.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google Cloud down right now?

Check the board above; it reflects our own probes against Cloud Storage from all five of our regions, refreshed every couple of minutes. That is one foundational GCP service, not a reading of every product Google Cloud runs.

My application uses GCP but this page shows it up. What should I check?

Check the Google Cloud Status Dashboard for the specific service and region your application depends on, because incidents are almost always scoped to one service rather than the whole platform. A quota limit, an IAM permission changed during unrelated work, or a regional event will all produce failures while GCP broadly reports healthy.

Does a Google Cloud outage in one region affect every customer?

No. Regions and even zones within a region operate largely independently, and most applications run in a small number of them rather than all. An incident in a region you do not use will not touch you, which is why reports during any GCP event can disagree without either side being wrong.

Is the Google Cloud Status Dashboard the same as this page?

No. Their dashboard reports what Google has confirmed internally, broken down by product and region, which is more detailed than any outside probe could be. This page reports what our own probes measured from outside GCP's infrastructure, on a fixed schedule, whether or not Google has published anything yet.

I am getting a 429 or quota-exceeded error from a Google Cloud API. Is that an outage?

No, that response means the service answered and is enforcing a limit tied to your project. Requesting a quota increase, adding backoff and retries, or spreading requests across more resources resolves it. None of it reflects a platform incident.