Compute Engine is the VM layer under most of Google Cloud - GKE nodes, Dataflow workers, and plenty of managed services ultimately run on it. Compute Engine incidents usually show up as failed instance creation in specific zones, live-migration hiccups, or persistent-disk latency, rather than running VMs all dying at once.
Instance creation failures in one or two zones (capacity or control-plane issues)
Elevated Persistent Disk latency making VMs slow rather than down
Networking impairment for instances in a single zone
API errors (instances.insert, instances.list) while running workloads stay healthy
Compute Engine questions
Is Compute Engine down right now?+
The live status at the top of this page reflects our latest check of Google Cloud health data. If it shows Operational, current problems are more likely zonal, in your VPC/firewall config, or in a dependent service.
Why can’t I create instances when Compute Engine shows green?+
Zonal capacity (stockouts) is the classic cause - a specific machine type can be exhausted in one zone while the region stays healthy. Try another zone or machine family, or use a regional managed instance group so the scheduler can spread across zones.
Does a Compute Engine outage qualify for an SLA credit?+
Instances spread across multiple zones carry a 99.99% monthly uptime SLA (a single instance is 99.5%). Below the target, Google pays tiered financial credits - but you must request them within 30 days of the incident, and credits cap at 50% of the monthly bill.
Get alerted when Compute Engine breaks
Instant email the moment we detect an incident - affected services and regions included.
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