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File photo of the Google logo.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
Thousands of users across India found themselves abruptly locked out of Google Meet calls after what appears to have been a wide-scale service disruption. Reports clustered around error messages and “502 — Bad Gateway” notifications, with many users unable to access meetings. The outage struck just days after a massive disruption triggered by Cloudflare, underscoring how deeply many popular online services depend on a few infrastructure providers.While Google has not yet released a detailed report on the outage, the timing and error patterns raise concerns among many users as so many platforms rely on the cloud and content-delivery infrastructure. The Cloudflare outage on November 18 had already exposed this vulnerability. On that day, Cloudflare reported that a bug in its Bot Management system caused a configuration file to balloon beyond expected limits.For many organisations and millions of end users, Cloudflare effectively acts as the “front door” of their online presence, providing caching, security, routing, DDoS protection, and global distribution.Just a month before the Cloudflare meltdown, AWS, the world’s largest cloud-compute and hosting provider, experienced its own major disruption originating in its U.S.-EAST-1 region. A DNS-related fault triggered cascading issues across thousands of services dependent on AWS, causing prolonged downtime for apps and sites around the globe.When seen together, these incidents paint a worrying picture: the very systems designed to make the internet more resilient, scalable and accessible are increasingly becoming critical single points of failure. Published – November 26, 2025 05:50 pm IST
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