Google Cloud’s us-central1-b outage stemmed from a maintenance mistake that disconnected every fiber path serving the affected zone. The September 1 incident left virtual machines unreachable and caused severe network degradation for more than four hours, despite the region’s multilayer redundancy.

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Google is pushing a more flexible pricing model for AI agents as companies struggle to control rapidly rising usage costs. The plan combines pay-as-you-go billing, token discounts of up to 20%, hard monthly spending caps, and a zero-cost base subscription—directly challenging Anthropic’s recurring seat fees and Microsoft’s separate usage licenses.

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