How a Single Null Check Crashed Google Cloud — Real-World Demo, Fix, and DevOps Lessons

1-Minute Recap

What happens when a missing null check slips into cloud infrastructure?

• Google Cloud’s Service Control crashed in every region due to a NullPointerException.

• API requests for core Google and customer services failed globally for hours.

• The root cause: a new policy code path without a feature flag or error handling—triggered instantly by a blank policy field.

• Full post-mortems, Java simulation, and practical fixes included below.

Who This Is For

• DevOps, SREs, and Cloud Engineers working on production infrastructure

• Anyone running mission-critical APIs or global services

• Teams interested in fail-safes, post-mortems, and real-world incident prevention

The Setup: Outage in Action, Real Error

Here’s what happened in production:

Within minutes, Google’s SREs began triaging, but the lack of error handling and feature flag made quick recovery impossible. The incident lasted up to 2h 40m in some regions.

What Went Wrong

• Missing null check in new policy code path

• No feature flag: risky code was live everywhere, not in just one region

• Global data replication: bug spread to all regions in seconds

• No exponential backoff: retry storms hammered the infrastructure

• Delayed customer communication: even status pages were affected

What To Do Instead

• Always use feature flags for risky new code and default them off until proven safe

• Add error handling: guard against null values and edge cases in all paths

• Roll out gradually: test new code in staging and then a subset of production before full release

• Implement exponential backoff to avoid overloading infrastructure during failures

• Ensure robust communication: have out-of-band alerts for major incidents

Get the Code + Live Demo

Want a hands-on Java demo that simulates the Google Cloud bug, crash, and fix?

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• Ready-to-run Java code for crash/fix simulation

• Step-by-step post-mortems and cloud reliability checklist

Break it. Learn it. Fix it.
Don’t wait for the next million-dollar bug!

Why This Matters

This is real-world DevOps, not theory.
A single missed null check or lack of rollout safety can impact millions.
Show your team or interviewers how you learn from big-tech incidents and build resilient systems.

Want Your Tool Featured?

If you build cloud reliability, error monitoring, or feature flag tools:

• Catch bugs before they go global

• Automate code safety and rollout controls

• Integrate incident post-mortems and live demos

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