A Google Cloud datacenter in Paris has been partially out of service since Wednesday morning. A water leak reportedly caused a blaze inside the facility, forcing users of 90 Google Cloud services to divert to other datacenters.
The first error message appeared at 4 a.m. Wednesday morning on Google Cloud’s status page. It affects the europe-west9-a zone. A “water intrusion” occurred and triggered the hardware to shut down automatically. Google still has not announced when all Cloud services will be fully enabled again.
Water reportedly leaked into the battery room, causing a fire. Firefighters had the fire under control by afternoon.
Worldwide
Several services are now back up and running. For example, Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Key Management, Cloud Identity and Access Management and Google Kubernetes Engine are available again within the europe-west9 region. Still, the Google Cloud Console was temporarily disabled worldwide. This console allows users to organize and monitor all kinds of aspects of the cloud environment.
The incident again highlights that moving to the cloud does not free organizations from physical problems. Although users can temporarily turn to neighbouring regions with failover, the service’s functionality is limited. Data in Paris may also belong to parties outside the surrounding areas. Thus, people around the world may be affected by a local problem.
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