Snowflake attributed its December 16, 2025 outage to a backward-incompatible database schema change in a new release that conflicted with older release packages. The incident ran from 02:55 to 15:59 UTC—13 hours and 4 minutes—and affected services across 10 of Snowflake’s 23 global regions, according to InfoWorld.
What happened during the Snowflake outage?
Snowflake’s incident record, INC0148543, lists a start time of 02:55 UTC and an end time of 15:59 UTC on December 16, 2025. That is 13 hours and 4 minutes; InfoWorld rounded the duration to 13 hours. InfoWorld reported that 10 of Snowflake’s 23 global regions were affected.
The symptoms extended beyond query availability. Snowflake reported that customers could be unable to run queries or experience degraded query performance, see data clustering appear unhealthy, and encounter delays or failures in Snowpipe and Snowpipe Streaming ingestion. Some users saw “SQL execution internal error” or similar messages. After service restoration, Snowflake warned that ingestion could remain delayed while backlogs cleared.
The incident record’s affected-service list includes two entries for Azure Sweden Central (Gävle), one of them specifically for Data Loading and Unloading. The reported count of 10 affected regions should therefore not be read as 10 distinct geographic names.
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What cause did Snowflake give?
Snowflake’s status-page explanation was that its latest release introduced a backward-incompatible database schema update. The company said older release packages then referenced updated fields, producing version-mismatch errors and causing operations to fail or take longer. This is Snowflake’s preliminary incident account, not a claim about findings in the detailed root-cause analysis.
Snowflake marked the incident resolved and said it was monitoring the fix. Its status page links a detailed RCA on Snowflake Community, but the linked page’s contents are not available in the cited record here. The status-page explanation does not establish what review, test, alert, or deployment decision allowed the incompatibility to reach affected services, nor does it document corrective actions.
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Why did regional redundancy not necessarily prevent the outage?
Snowflake did not describe the incident as a cloud-provider or physical-region failure. Its preliminary explanation instead points to a software compatibility problem. InfoWorld quoted Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, on the broader resilience distinction: “Regional redundancy works when failure is physical or infrastructural. It does not work when failure is logical and shared.” That is analyst commentary, not Snowflake’s account of its architecture or the outage’s root cause.
The incident’s multi-region reach is a reminder that a second region is useful only to the extent that it is independent of the failing component or dependency. The available incident explanation does not identify the precise dependencies shared among affected regions, so it cannot establish exactly why regional boundaries did not contain the impact.
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Snowflake said it had no available workaround other than failing over to non-impacted regions for customers with replication enabled. During the outage it recommended failover for affected customers using replication. After service was observed as restored in affected regions, Snowflake said failover was no longer recommended unless a customer continued to experience impact. Replication was therefore a conditional recovery option, not a universal fix.
What Snowflake says about release safeguards
Snowflake’s release documentation says it deploys new releases weekly. It describes regular build testing, continuous workload and performance testing, regression testing in internal accounts across supported cloud platforms, and simulations of selected customer workloads.
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Full releases
For full releases, Snowflake describes a four-stage rollout over multiple days: early access for designated Enterprise-or-higher accounts, regular access for Standard accounts, late access for Enterprise-or-higher accounts, and final stable access for Enterprise-or-higher accounts. The documented minimum period between early and final stages is typically 48 hours. Snowflake says monitoring during the stages can reveal issues and a release may be halted or rolled back; follow-up for a halted or rolled-back release is typically completed within 24–48 hours.
Patch releases and optional early access
Patch releases follow a different process: Snowflake says all accounts move on the same day. Separately, Enterprise Edition or higher organizations can designate development or test accounts for optional early access, exercise production workloads against a new full release, and contact Support if issues arise. Snowflake describes this option as intended for organizations seeking additional certainty, not as something required or recommended for everyone.
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These public process descriptions provide context, but they do not show which release type, account groups, rollout stages, or safeguards applied to INC0148543. They also do not establish which alerts fired or why the schema change was not caught before the incident.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to assess resilience against a similar failure
Regional replication remains relevant to recovery, but it should be assessed separately from protection against a logical compatibility problem. A useful review distinguishes the failure being planned for, the independence of the recovery environment, and the consequences of switching over.
Quick Recap
- Classify failure scenarios: Test cloud-provider or physical-region disruption separately from incompatible releases, shared-state errors, and other logical failures. A design that addresses one class does not automatically address the others.
- Check failure-domain independence: Map same-region, cross-region, and cross-cloud placements to the services and dependencies they rely on. Do not assume different locations are independent without validating the relevant dependency boundaries.
- Verify readiness: Confirm replication is configured for the workloads that need it and exercise the failover procedure. Snowflake’s incident-specific workaround applied only to customers with replication enabled.
- Review release exposure: Consider representative workload testing, account grouping, detection signals, rollout stages, and whether rollback is feasible. Snowflake documents staged full releases and optional early access, but the public description does not establish how they operated during this outage.
- Plan for recovery consequences: Include query availability, ingestion backlogs, data freshness, delayed tasks, and validation before returning to a primary region. Snowflake specifically noted that ingestion delays could persist while the backlog cleared.
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