Google has admitted that incorrectly typing the name of a case-sensitive variable cooked its cloud.

Users of the Alphabet subsidiary's Google Container Engine customers “could not create external load balancers for their services for a duration of 21 hours and 38 min” on December 8th and 9th.

The mess started when Google implemented “a minor update to the Compute Engine API” that underpins its Container Engine. That update “inadvertently changed the case-sensitivity of the “sessionAffinity” enum variable in the target pool definition, and this variation was not covered by testing.”

“Google Container Engine was not aware of this change and sent requests with incompatible case, causing the Compute Engine API to return an error status.”

It took a rollback of the system to get it up again. Later investigation revealed the typo.

Google's incident report says “this is not the level of quality and reliability we strive to offer you, and we have taken and are taking immediate steps to improve the platform’s performance and availability.”

Might those steps include training in proof-reading, or extra instruction on how to use the shift key? ®

Bootnote: Yes, we are aware El Reg is not always a paragon of purity, and that there is probably a pot-kettle-black mistake in this very story.