Snowflake update caused a blizzard of failures worldwide

Customers in 10 of the company’s 23 regions had “operations fail or take an extended amount of time to complete.”

Snowflake pushed an update this week that caused a “major outage” worldwide, leaving many users unable to query data, experiencing failures when ingesting files, and receiving error messages for 13 hours, the company wrote in an impact statement.

“Our initial investigation has identified that our most recent release introduced a backwards-incompatible database schema update,” the company wrote in its incident report. “As a result, previous release packages errantly referenced the updated fields, resulting in version mismatch errors and causing operations to fail or take an extended amount of time to complete.”

The update took down 10 of Snowflake’s 23 global regions. In the US, the outage hit chunks of Snowflake customers accessing its Azure data center in Virginia, and its AWS data center in Oregon. Globally, users of ...