Google experienced a major incident on July 14, 2026 affecting VMWare engine and australia-southeast1 and 1 more component, lasting 10h 40m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Jul 14, 2026, 08:24 PM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We are continuing to investigate and mitigate the issue. We believe this disruption is isolated to network connectivity issues for stretch clusters, while Storage and Compute services appear to be unaffected. GCVE VMs are running as expected but customers may experience connectivity issues to the VMs. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 14:00 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: None at this time.
- investigating Jul 14, 2026, 09:31 PM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) stretched cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We have identified the customers that are affected by this issue and we are working with them on mitigation. Our preliminary investigation indicates this is stemming from an underlying network connectivity issue affecting the infrastructure that links the zones within a stretch cluster. This disruption is causing synchronization issues between the affected zones. We believe Storage and Compute services remain unaffected, and VMs are running as expected, though connectivity to them may be degraded. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 15:00 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: While we work on restoring full connectivity, we recommend the following workarounds to restore access to your workloads: - VM Migration (recommended): Where possible, migrate your affected VMs to the healthy and unaffected side of the stretch cluster. We strongly recommend consulting with Google Support before proceeding.
- investigating Jul 14, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) stretched cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We have identified the customers that are affected by this issue and we are working with them on mitigation. Our investigation has identified underlying inter-zone communication failures and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) session flapping between cluster zones. Specifically, network connectivity has been lost between the affected zones and the witness appliance. Because the witness appliance is currently unreachable, the cluster zones are unable to safely synchronize state. As a result, VMs on the affected sites are becoming isolated and may be left without writable data. Failover / VM Migration: Migrating affected VMs to the healthy, secondary zone of your stretch cluster remains the primary mitigation strategy. Because of the complexities surrounding failover risks and secondary zone health, we highly encourage you to open a ticket with Google Cloud Support if you are severely impacted. We do not currently have an ETA for resolution. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 16:00 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: While we work on restoring full connectivity, we recommend the following workarounds to restore access to your workloads: - VM Migration (recommended): Where possible, migrate your affected VMs to the healthy and unaffected side of the stretch cluster. We strongly recommend consulting with Google Support before proceeding.
- investigating Jul 14, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) stretched cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We have identified the customers that are affected by this issue and we are working with them on mitigation. Our investigation has identified a recent configuration update that is the likely cause of the inter-zone network disruption. Teams are working on remediation. Failover / VM Migration: Migrating affected VMs to the healthy, secondary zone of your stretch cluster remains the primary mitigation strategy. Because of the complexities surrounding failover risks and secondary zone health, we highly encourage you to open a ticket with Google Cloud Support if you are severely impacted. We do not currently have an ETA for resolution. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 17:00 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: While we work on restoring full connectivity, we recommend the following workarounds to restore access to your workloads: - VM Migration (recommended): Where possible, migrate your affected VMs to the healthy and unaffected side of the stretch cluster. We strongly recommend consulting with Google Support before proceeding.
- investigating Jul 15, 2026, 12:13 AM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) stretched cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We have identified the customers that are affected by this issue and we are working with them on mitigation. A remediation rollout is currently in progress to address the underlying network issue. Failover / VM Migration: Migrating affected VMs to the healthy, secondary zone of your stretch cluster remains the primary mitigation strategy. Because of the complexities surrounding failover risks and secondary zone health, we highly encourage you to open a ticket with Google Cloud Support if you are severely impacted. We do not currently have an ETA for resolution. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 18:00 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Upon further investigation we identified that the northamerica-northeast2 region was not impacted. Workaround: While we work on restoring full connectivity, we recommend the following workarounds to restore access to your workloads: - VM Migration (recommended): Where possible, migrate your affected VMs to the healthy and unaffected side of the stretch cluster. We strongly recommend consulting with Google Support before proceeding.
- investigating Jul 15, 2026, 01:15 AM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) stretched cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We have identified the customers that are affected by this issue and we are working with them on mitigation. A remediation rollout is currently in progress to address the underlying network issue. Failover / VM Migration: Migrating affected VMs to the healthy, secondary zone of your stretch cluster remains the primary mitigation strategy. Because of the complexities surrounding failover risks and secondary zone health, we highly encourage you to open a ticket with Google Cloud Support if you are severely impacted. We do not currently have an ETA for resolution. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 19:00 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: While we work on restoring full connectivity, we recommend the following workarounds to restore access to your workloads: - VM Migration (recommended): Where possible, migrate your affected VMs to the healthy and unaffected side of the stretch cluster. We strongly recommend consulting with Google Support before proceeding.
- investigating Jul 15, 2026, 01:55 AM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) stretched cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We have identified the customers that are affected by this issue and we are working with them on mitigation. A remediation rollout is currently in progress to address the underlying network issue. Failover / VM Migration: Migrating affected VMs to the healthy, secondary zone of your stretch cluster remains the primary mitigation strategy. Because of the complexities surrounding failover risks and secondary zone health, we highly encourage you to open a ticket with Google Cloud Support if you are severely impacted. We do not currently have an ETA for resolution. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 20:30 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: While we work on restoring full connectivity, we recommend the following workarounds to restore access to your workloads: - VM Migration (recommended): Where possible, migrate your affected VMs to the healthy and unaffected side of the stretch cluster. We strongly recommend consulting with Google Support before proceeding.
- investigating Jul 15, 2026, 03:27 AM UTC
Description: We are experiencing an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) stretched cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We have identified the customers that are affected by this issue and we are working with them on mitigation. A remediation rollout is currently in progress to address the underlying network issue. Failover / VM Migration: Migrating affected VMs to the healthy, secondary zone of your stretch cluster remains the primary mitigation strategy. Because of the complexities surrounding failover risks and secondary zone health, we highly encourage you to open a ticket with Google Cloud Support if you are severely impacted. We do not currently have an ETA for resolution. We will provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 22:00 PDT with current details. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may experience inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: While we work on restoring full connectivity, we recommend the following to restore access to your workloads: * VM Migration (recommended): Where possible, migrate your affected VMs to the healthy and unaffected side of the stretch cluster. We strongly recommend consulting with Google Cloud Support before proceeding.
- resolved Jul 15, 2026, 05:34 AM UTC
Description: We experienced an inter-site communication issue with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Stretched Cluster customers beginning Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 10:00 PDT. We identified the affected customers, and have worked with them to fully mitigate the issue by Tuesday, 2026-07-14 at 21:46 PDT. Preliminary analysis indicates that a network configuration update was the cause of the inter-zone network disruption. Our engineering team mitigated the issue by rolling back the faulty configuration to its last-known good value. If customers are still experiencing impact from this issue, please contact Support, and we will work with you to resolve any residual impact. We thank you for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue. Customer symptoms: Some GCVE customers using Stretched Cluster may have experienced inter-site communication failures to their GCVE environments within the affected zones. Workaround: The issue is now mitigated.
- resolved Jul 20, 2026, 06:31 PM UTC
Preliminary Incident Report We sincerely apologize for the disruption this incident caused to your business. We know how much you rely on Google Cloud, and we regret the impact on your productivity. We are working to address the root cause and prevent this from occurring in the future. Please note, this information is based on our best knowledge at the time of posting and is subject to change as our investigation continues. A final Incident Report with preventative actions will be posted once our investigation is complete. If you have experienced impact outside of what is listed below, please reach out to Google Cloud Support using https://cloud.google.com/support (https://cloud.google.com/support). Date/Time of the Issue (All time US/Pacific) Incident Start: 14 July 2026 10:00 Incident End: 14 July 2026 20:40 Duration: 10 hours, 40 minutes Summary On Tuesday, 14 July 2026, Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Stretched Cluster customers in the australia-southeast2 and europe-west3 zones experienced inter-site communication failures. The disruption was traced to a network configuration update that introduced a conflict, causing inter-site communication failures, which triggered VMware Stretch Cluster failover events. Google engineers successfully mitigated the disruption by rolling back the configuration change. Preliminary Root Cause A configuration change deployed within the Google Cloud network affected traffic between the VMware Engine stretched cluster zones. This resulted in a loss of connectivity between zones in the stretched cluster deployment. Google engineers are doing a full root cause analysis and will provide additional information once it is available. Remediation To stabilize the environment, engineers identified the working network paths and deployed configuration changes to reroute traffic and restore connectivity. GCVE stretch cluster inter-zonal connectivity was completely restored for all supported locations on Tuesday, 14 July 2026 at 20:40 US/Pacific. Description of Impact On Tuesday, 14 July 2026 from 10:00 to 20:40 US/Pacific, customers utilizing GCVE stretch clusters in the affected zones (australia-southeast2, and europe-west3) experienced inter-site communication failures. For some customers, depending on their architecture, this disruption led to VMWare HA event causing VM restarts/movement across zones as designed, Host disconnects, VSAN alarms and Intermittent access to VMware Management (vCenter/NSX Manager) components. ---
- resolved Jul 24, 2026, 07:10 AM UTC
Incident Report Summary On Tuesday, 14 July 2026 10:00 PT, Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Stretched Cluster customers in the australia-southeast2 and europe-west3 zones experienced inter-site communication failures. The disruption was traced to a network configuration update that introduced a conflict, causing inter-site communication failures, which triggered VMware Stretch Cluster failover events. Google engineers successfully mitigated the impact by rolling back the issue-causing configuration change and resetting the network state. We sincerely apologize for the disruption this incident caused to your business. We know how much you rely on Google Cloud, and we regret the impact on your productivity. We are working to address the root cause and prevent this from occurring in the future. Root Cause A network configuration update intended to prepare the cloud network infrastructure for new capabilities was deployed to the foundational network control plane. While the configuration payload itself was structurally valid, it exposed an implementation gap within the control plane's routing logic. This logical gap caused the underlying network hosts to misconfigure program routing tables. As a result, traffic destined for the private IP address space used by GCVE Stretched Clusters was dropped. Because Stretched Clusters rely on this private address space to establish routing sessions for inter-zonal connectivity, the traffic drops severed communications between the active zones of the clusters, triggering VMware High Availability (HA) failovers. Standard routing health-checking protocols, such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD), remained fully functional because their control plane sessions run on separate, unaffected address spaces. Because the control plane remained healthy, standard failover mechanisms failed to detect that the selective private IP range used for inter-zonal data tunneling was being dropped. Automated safeguards did not block the deployment because the configuration passed initial payload validations. The impact only manifested once the update began routing data traffic through the specific affected IP range. Remediation and Prevention To stabilize the environment, engineers identified the working network paths and deployed configuration changes to reroute traffic and restore connectivity. GCVE Stretch Cluster inter-zonal connectivity was completely restored for all supported locations on Tuesday, 14 July 2026 at 20:40 US/Pacific. Google is committed preventing a repeat of this issue in the future and is completing the following actions: * Expanded Testing: We are adding more detailed GCVE network setups to our existing testing environments. This allows us to automatically test future network updates against these configurations before they go live. * Service-Level Data Path Failover: We are implementing additional service-level data path failover mechanisms that actively probe the specific data-tunneling traffic space. This will ensure a path failover is triggered if the data plane itself is degraded even when the BGP control plane remains functional. * Detailed Alerting: We are adding faster, more specific alerts for connection issues between zones. This builds on our current platform monitoring to catch minor disruptions early and speed up our response. * Improved Cluster Resilience: We are fine-tuning the cluster's high-availability and storage settings. This makes virtual machines more resilient to short network drops, preventing them from restarting unnecessarily if the main site is still healthy. * Workload Resilience Alignment (Shared Responsibility): We are proactively reaching out to customers utilizing non-vSAN replicated virtual machine configurations within Stretched Clusters. Because these workloads are pinned to a single zone without active cross-site replication, they cannot survive inter-site network disruptions. We are ready to assist customers in auditing their storage policies, adjusting Stretched Cluster configurations, and planning the secondary zone capacity required to enable robust high-availability failovers. Detailed Description of Impact On Tuesday, 14 July 2026 from 10:00 to 20:40 US/Pacific, customers utilizing GCVE Stretch Clusters in the affected zones (australia-southeast2, and europe-west3) experienced inter-site communication failures. For some customers, depending on their architecture, this disruption led to a VMWare HA event causing VM restarts/movement across zones as designed, host disconnects, VSAN alarms and intermittent access to VMware Management (vCenter/NSX Manager) components.