What was going on
Running firebase deploy --only functions (firebase-tools 13.11.2, also seen on other 13.x versions) failed with: Error: Cloud Runtime Config is currently experiencing issues, which is preventing your functions from being deployed. Please wait a few minutes and then try to deploy your functions again. Nothing was wrong on the public Firebase status pages, and retrying did not help. The thread gathered 100+ comments across two waves (June 2024 and November 2024).
What fixed it
The root cause is server-side on Google's end: firebase deploy calls the Cloud Runtime Configuration API (runtimeconfig.googleapis.com) during functions deploys, and when that API 500s the deploy halts. In the June 2024 wave Firebase support escalated to engineering and confirmed the fix server-side. If you hit this again, the verified workaround is: open the GCP console for your project, go to APIs & Services, and disable the Cloud Runtime Configuration API , but only if you use Secret Manager or no config at all; if you use config (v1) or params (v2) for your functions, that API is required and this workaround will not work for you. Also note there is a request quota on this API during deploys that is easy to hit with 5+ functions , in that case deploy only changed functions, e.g. firebase deploy --only functions:addMessage,functions:makeUppercase. Source: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-tools/issues/7341