Snowflake Cloud Data Platform Suffers 13-Hour Outage Affecting Multiple Regions
A critical software update triggered a widespread outage at Snowflake, impacting its cloud data platform across ten of its 23 global regions for a significant 13-hour period on December 16th. The disruption left customers unable to execute queries, ingest new data, or maintain optimal data warehouse performance. The incident underscores the growing complexities of managing distributed cloud infrastructure and the potential for seemingly minor code changes to have far-reaching consequences.
Users attempting to access their Snowflake data warehouses encountered “SQL execution internal error” messages, as detailed in Snowflake’s official incident report. Beyond query failures, the outage severely hampered data ingestion processes, specifically impacting Snowpipe and Snowpipe Streaming, and led to instability in data clustering operations. This widespread impact highlights the interconnected nature of Snowflake’s services and the cascading effect of a core system failure.
Snowflake’s initial investigation revealed that a recent software release contained a backwards-incompatible schema update. This meant that older software versions were attempting to interact with database fields that no longer existed in the updated schema, resulting in version mismatch errors and operational failures. The company initially projected a resolution by 15:00 UTC, but later revised the estimate to 16:30 UTC as recovery efforts in the Virginia region proved more challenging than anticipated.
The affected regions included Azure East US 2 (Virginia), AWS US West (Oregon), AWS Europe (Ireland), AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Azure Switzerland North (Zürich), Google Cloud Platform Europe West 2 (London), Azure Southeast Asia (Singapore), Azure Mexico Central, and Azure Sweden Central. While Snowflake recommended failover to unaffected regions for customers utilizing data replication, this workaround was not universally applicable, leaving many organizations without immediate access to their critical data.
Snowflake has committed to publishing a comprehensive root cause analysis (RCA) within five business days. However, the company offered limited immediate information, stating, “We do not have anything to share beyond this for now.”
The Illusion of Redundancy: Why Multi-Region Architecture Wasn’t Enough
The Snowflake outage serves as a stark reminder that multi-region architecture, while valuable for physical infrastructure resilience, doesn’t automatically guarantee protection against all types of failures. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, explains that failures stemming from logical inconsistencies – such as a backwards-incompatible schema change – can propagate across geographically dispersed regions, rendering redundancy ineffective.
“Regional redundancy excels when dealing with physical or infrastructural failures. However, it falters when the failure is logical and shared,” Gogia stated. “When the fundamental ‘contract’ between services changes in a way that older versions can’t understand, all regions relying on that contract become vulnerable, regardless of data location.”
This incident also exposes a potential disconnect between testing methodologies and real-world production environments. Gogia points out that production systems are dynamic, with varying client versions, cached execution plans, and long-running jobs that span multiple releases. Backwards compatibility issues often surface only when these complex interactions occur, making exhaustive pre-release simulation exceedingly difficult.
Snowflake’s staged rollout process, described in Snowflake’s release documentation, is often perceived as a safety net. However, Gogia cautions that staged rollouts are probabilistic risk reduction mechanisms, not absolute containment guarantees. Backwards-incompatible changes can degrade functionality gradually, spreading across regions before detection thresholds are triggered.
“When platforms depend on globally coordinated metadata services, regional isolation is conditional,” Gogia emphasizes. “By the time symptoms become apparent, a rollback may no longer be a viable option.” Rolling back code is relatively straightforward, but reverting schema and metadata changes is far more complex, requiring careful sequencing and validation to avoid further data corruption.
The Intertwined Risks of Outages and Security Breaches
Gogia argues that the December outage, coupled with a security incident earlier in 2024 where approximately 165 Snowflake customers were targeted by credential-stealing malware, points to a fundamental weakness in operational resilience. These incidents aren’t isolated events; they are symptoms of a broader issue: inadequate control maturity under stress.
“These are manifestations of the same underlying issue: control maturity under stress,” Gogia explains. “The security incidents exposed vulnerabilities in identity governance, while the outage revealed weaknesses in compatibility governance.”
CIOs must move beyond traditional metrics like uptime and compliance to focus on behavioral questions. How does the platform respond when assumptions fail? How effectively does it detect emerging risks? And how quickly can the blast radius of an incident be contained? These are the critical questions that will define true operational resilience in the modern cloud era.
What steps can organizations take to proactively mitigate the risk of similar outages? And how can cloud providers improve their testing and deployment processes to prevent these incidents from occurring in the first place?
Frequently Asked Questions About the Snowflake Outage
What caused the Snowflake outage on December 16th?
The outage was caused by a backwards-incompatible schema update introduced in a recent software release. This update created version mismatch errors, preventing users from executing queries and ingesting data.
Which Snowflake regions were affected by the outage?
Ten of Snowflake’s 23 global regions were impacted, including locations in the US, Europe, Asia, and Mexico. Specific regions included Azure East US 2, AWS US West, and AWS Europe.
How long did the Snowflake outage last?
The outage lasted for approximately 13 hours, beginning on December 16th and extending into the following day. Recovery efforts were prolonged by challenges in the Virginia region.
What is a backwards-incompatible schema update and why is it problematic?
A backwards-incompatible schema update changes the structure of the database in a way that older software versions cannot understand. This can lead to errors and failures when those older versions attempt to interact with the updated database.
Did Snowflake offer a workaround during the outage?
Snowflake recommended that customers with data replication enabled failover to unaffected regions as a workaround. However, this option was not available to all users.
What is Snowflake doing to prevent similar outages in the future?
Snowflake has committed to publishing a root cause analysis (RCA) within five business days to detail the factors that contributed to the outage and outline steps to prevent recurrence.
This incident underscores the importance of robust testing, careful deployment strategies, and a proactive approach to operational resilience in the cloud. As organizations increasingly rely on cloud data platforms like Snowflake, understanding the potential risks and implementing appropriate safeguards is paramount.
Share this article with your network to raise awareness about the challenges of cloud data platform reliability. Join the conversation in the comments below – what are your thoughts on the Snowflake outage and its implications for the future of cloud computing?
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