It said it will share a root cause analysis (RCA) document within five working days.
“We do not have anything to share beyond this for now,” the company said.
Why multi-region architecture failed to protect customers
The type of failure that hit Snowflake — a backwards-incompatible schema change causing multi-region outages — represents a consistently underestimated failure class in modern cloud data platforms, according to Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. Schema and metadata sit in the control plane layer that governs how services interpret state and coordinate behavior across geographies, he said.
“Regional redundancy works when failure is physical or infrastructural. It does not work when failure is logical and shared,” Gogia said. “When metadata contracts change in a backwards-incompatible way, every region that depends on that shared contract becomes vulnerable, regardless of where the data physically resides.”
The outage exposed a misalignment between how platforms test and how production actually behaves, Gogia said. Production involves drifting client versions, cached execution plans, and long-running jobs that cross release boundaries. “Backwards compatibility failures typically surface only when these realities intersect, which is difficult to simulate exhaustively before release,” he said.
The issue raises questions about Snowflake’s staged deployment process. Staged rollouts are widely misunderstood as containment guarantees when they are actually probabilistic risk reduction mechanisms, Gogia said. Backwards-incompatible schema changes often degrade functionality gradually as mismatched components interact, allowing the change to propagate across regions before detection thresholds are crossed, he said.
