You see this at least once a year. Never heard of this from AWS or Azure.
In all seriousness, this is why we don't use them. They have the most ergonomic cloud of the big three, then absolutely murder it by having this kind of reputation.
The outage in the linked article appears to have been resolved in 4-5 hours.
While its possible to to isolate the effects, judging by how many things stop working when there is an AWS failure a lot of people fail to do that. I think the shit of responsibility to AWS removes the incentive to put effort into resilience against AWS failure.
https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...
It had lasting effects for us for a little over 3 hours.
No it didn't impact us.
December 2021: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/aws-outage-takes-do...
June 2023: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-52
October 2025: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/amazon-web-services-outage-t...
Each of these were massive outages impacting very large services across the web.
Google Cloud accidentally deletes $125 billion Australian pension fund - May 2024
also, I can't help but imagine if instead of render, it was Apple's account which could've been auto-banned (Render is almost a billion dollar company or series-B, I am not sure)
I haven't read the articles and I admit that but can you please elaborate to me on why Apple uses GCP themselves for idrive, I would love to know the technical decisions behind it on a genuinely curious level.
From my (let's face it) limited understanding of GCP, it isn't particularly good or price performant and one of the wonders is that Google sells it directly with Google photos too and an competitive lineup at android.
So in some sense if Apple is using gcp's for icloud then aren't they just reselling google storage themselves and google can always beat them in pricing while also wanting to chew away at the percentage of iphones themselves too?
I mean, I can still try to understand the google search pays apple 10 billion dollars (right?) deal but I don't quite understand why apple would pick GCP when the hosting market is one of the more competitive ones with lots of companies.
I would love to get some explainations or theories as to why exactly is that the case
(Also given its HN, if anyone from apple is reading or knows the answer, I would love that too!)
Apple uses Samsung displays and Sony camera sensors, iirc, both of which are flagship Android phone makers. That doesn't really seem to be a concern in their procurement thinking. iCloud and Google Photos are not that direct competitors because which one is native depends on which phone you already bought. Google Photos definitely does have some market share on iOS due to having 3x the free storage and a handy compression mode (which used to be entirely unmetered at launch but now still uses storage, just less of it). But it will never be a full competitor because it is a separate app you have to install and it can't magically fetch cloud-only photos from the camera roll and photo picker UI like iCloud can.
The pricing of Google One and Apple One/iCloud+ isn't really dictated by underlying storage costs. At the higher tiers like 2TB, many don't come close to using all, while the laughable 5GB iCloud free tier clearly costs almost nothing in raw store, even on nVME SSD, if you compare it to S3/Backblaze or even raw disk pricing on the cloud.
Each division also cross-charges, so Samsung Mobile would be paying Samsung Displays for the screens, and possibly at a small, guaranteed and non-negotiable margin.
Without a global strategy not to do so, divisions within an enterprise optimize for their own bottom line and have internal discussions on build-vs-buy even if they have an internal factory.
Look up “buy or build” which is the industry term for this kind of evaluation: buy product and use it/resell it or build your own.
Apple has gone for different strategies in various areas:
Build own Apple silicon chips, do not buy off the shelf chips from intel or nvidia or amd.
Buy and resell google storage but don’t want to build their own distributed data store for end users.
It’s about what matters more for the company and the core products. Apple’s laptops, cell phones are considered core products. Icloud is a value add.
This is also why apple is making their own cell phone broadband chips. For most companies, this is a “buy from qualcolm” but apple needs to build their own for independence for their number 1 core product: the iphone.
I believe you mean Railway.
Render (a $1.5B company) has been hosting customers on GCP since 2018, and has never been banned.
> Render (a $1.5B company) has been hosting customers on GCP since 2018, and has never been banned.
speaking of which, I have a question for render but how does render prevent something like what has happened with railway (ie. the account getting banned), I would love to know more about what the team at render thinks of such and also I would love to get some thoughts on why Render is using GCP, I would love to know some architectural decisions behind it as I am curious about it!
Once again, thanks for responding to me and waiting for your response and have a nice day anurag!
Then there's Anthropic...huge user.
GCP is the world's third largest cloud provider, and has around half of AWS' market share. Claiming no one uses it reads like Yogi Berra's "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded".
AWS also includes Amazon WorkSpaces. Moreover, AWS includes all of Amazon's cloud infrastructure for things like Amazon music, Ring, Amazon Prime Video, etc.
Last I checked I don't think AWS included things like Amazon Prime Video either, AWS is primarily their buissness/platform offerings, not consumer things like Twitch/Prime/Music/etc.
With that said, I would not say few companies rely on GCP. Search for "GCP" in this month's HN hiring thread. There are 23 hits, more than Azure's 21. AWS has 90 hits, which I guess shows its sheer dominance in the startup space. But these figures more or less agree with my intuition of the major clouds being AWS/GCP/Azure.
They had a really bad global outage a year ago. At least with AWS outages are contained to a single region.
Your cloud provider blocking your business from running is far worse.
I can’t imagine AWS ever doing such a cascading delete. I mean, they have made deletion protection a difficult thing to ignore even for individual resources.
AWS does it more efficiently; it takes down many startups at a time when us-east-1 goes down.
I remember a Workspaces outage about 5 or 6 years ago, and the problem for us was that the redirect link in the console had US East 1 in it.
The workspaces themselves weren't in US East 1 and nothing relied on US East 1.
Emailing users who needed it an alternative link with a different region in the URL for the login redirect fixed it for us.
I know some workloads help to be colocated but all these places are connected by fiber and every cloud has a worldwide CDN it seems.
It's one of the oldest and largest regions. It hosts the most services, both low-level platform stuff and higher level managed services (which run on the low-level platform stuff), so services tend to be more performant.
Geographic location is also good.
Also, due to scale their pricing ends up being cheaper.
Let's say that it's the region people use by default, unless they have a compelling reason to have a presence in any other particular region.
It's AWS and Azure that are the outliers and tend not to care too much what their customers do with their infrastructure. AWS is perfectly fine with allowing me to run copies of 15 year old vulnerable AMIs copied from AMIs they've long since deprecated and removed. Even for removed features like NAT AMIs.
Azure nerfed the front door of all Azure and O365 services last year.
All of these companies are great at what they did, and occasionally fuck up.
The only anecdotal thing I've seen is we hired a vendor to do a pentest a few years ago, and they setup some stuff in an AWS account and that account got totally yeeted out of existence by AWS if memory serves.
Cuz otherwise you look like a threat actor.
That’s assuming your vendor was pentesting AWS systems. If you meant you hired a vendor to pentest your own systems on AWS, that’s of course a totally different matter.
Sorry for being unclear, the vendor was attacking our organization only, and any other company was expressly forbidden in the contract. As I recall it was a fake SSO sign-in page to collect credentials that they would try and social engineer our employees with.