Google own-goaled its zone-resilient VMware clusters across three regions — and took 12 hours to recover

Google sells stretched private clouds as protection against a complete failure of any one zone. But it messed up the network config.

By Phillip de Wet

Updated Jul 15, 2026 4:38 PM / Published Jul 15, 2026 10:22 AM 2 min read

Google own-goaled its zone-resilient VMware clusters across three regions — and took 12 hours to recover — Photo by David Farkas on Unsplash

Google Cloud on Tuesday recorded an outage of 11 hours and 46 minutes for regions in Australia and Europe on a product specifically marketed as protection against zonal outages.

Customers on Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Stretched Cluster saw cluster zones fail to synchronise state after what turned out to be a faulty network configuration update.

In the end, Google said, its engineers rolled back the configuration to the last-known good value.

It did not immediately respond to questions from The Stack, including why recovery took nearly half a day.

Nor did it say how many customers were actually affected.

When the witness fails

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Phillip de Wet

Phillip de Wet started in journalism as an honest B2B IT-sector reporter before straying into business, politics, and international affairs. He is currently in recovery, studying AI while writing about everything from hardware to infosec policy.