For three weeks, the Google Cloud Data Center located in Paris has been plagued by a major outage, jeopardizing the stability of some online services. The consequences are heavy for users who depend on the availability of these critical services.
A fire affected a data center on a Paris campus on April 26. After this event, a subsequent update indicated that only one space was impacted and that the flames were quickly brought under control. This allowed the data center to remain operational.
However, the incident caused an outage in the europe-west9-a region of Google Cloud. An affected victim has not yet communicated a clear directive, but confirmed that its teams were on site to assess the physical equipment in the cluster.
Records of affected products have also been updated. It has been revealed that Cloud Bigtable is the only product still affected in the europe-west9-a region. However, other products are only affected in the instances of the damaged data center. Unaffected jurisdictions continue to operate normally. In addition, full recovery of the affected instances in this region could take some time.
What was the impact of the fire on the data center that caused the outage?
The reason for the fire is not yet clear. According to a thread about the incident, it is possible that the incident was caused by a faulty coolant pump. This resulted in a leak in the battery room and a subsequent fire. The firefighters had to be careful, because the fire had an electrical origin, producing a significant amount of heat. This obstacle complicated the task of extinction. The cleanup of the incident should also be important.
In addition, the Frankfurt area in Germany experienced a service interruption of almost five hours last weekend. This outage caused Google Cloud products to be unavailable to customers. Although spring in Paris is supposed to be a pleasant time of year, the cloudy outages that have resulted in metaphorical gray skies in IT operations create a rather gloomy atmosphere. Google must now face this difficult situation.
Companies depend on data centers to store and manage their sensitive data. However, these data centers can be vulnerable to outages, which can cause significant disruption to users. The reasons for the breakdowns can be multiple. The most common causes include power failures, configuration errors, human error, hardware failures, and natural disasters such as storms, earthquakes, or floods.
Power supply failures can result from electrical overload, power interruption or generator malfunction. Configuration errors can be caused by incorrect installation or faulty software. Human errors can be caused by negligence or unintentional action during maintenance operations. Hardware failures can result from natural wear and tear of the equipment or from manufacturing defects.