Google Cloud has admitted it made a configuration change that means some customers of its VMware Engine (GCVE) can’t use stretched cluster. A G-Cloud incident report time-stamped 13:24 PDT on July 14 (21:24 UTC) reports some customers “are experiencing zonal outages impacting network connectivity across multiple regions” and that the trouble started at 10:00 PDT. Google first attributed the problem to “an underlying network connectivity issue affecting the infrastructure that links the zones within a stretch cluster,” and warned “This disruption is causing synchronization issues between the affected zones.” Storage and compute services weren’t impacted, and VMs kept running. Users just couldn’t reach their virtual servers. That’s bad because the whole point of stretched clusters is to enhance resilience by creating a virtual pool of resources that spans two physical sites, while keeping the two rigs in synch to enable rapid failover without disruption. Google’s next update offered “underlying inter-zone communication failures and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) session flapping between cluster zones” as the reason for the mess, adding “Specifically, network connectivity has been lost between the affected zones and the witness appliance. Because the witness appliance is currently unreachable, the cluster zones are unable to safely synchronize state.” At 16:05 PDT Google ‘fessed up. “Our investigation has identified a recent configuration update that is the likely cause of the inter-zone network disruption,” the web giant admitted. “Teams are working on remediation.” Google hasn’t said when it will set things right, so customers in the impacted regions – australia-southeast1, australia-southeast2, europe-west3, and northamerica-northeast2 – must wait to learn when they’ll once again enjoy the resilience they pay for. Other VMware customers may not want to wait because the Broadcom business unit on Tuesday warned of seven flaws in its VMware Avi Load Balancer. One of them, CVE-2026-47865, is an authentication bypass vulnerability that earned a CVSS score of 9.8. The product’s name is a little misleading, as it’s actually a full Application Delivery Controller that includes load balancing and a Web Application Firewall VMware hasn’t said much about the flaw other than warning “A malicious user with network access may be able to access the Avi Control plane by bypassing the authentication mechanism.” The tool works with VMware’s Cloud Foundation bundle, Kubernetes Service, and can connect resources in public clouds. Unauthorized access is therefore distinctly undesirable. The five remaining CVEs are also significant, with CVSS ratings ranging from 8.8 to 7.1. Broadcom has fixed the flaws in recent updates to the product. ®