1 min

Tags in this article

, , ,

The Google Cloud data center near Paris remains offline for now. Although the outage affects many users in Western Europe, Google has not provided any updates since it recommended switching to other regions three weeks ago.

We reported on the problems at the facility late last month. A leak caused some of the hardware present to catch fire, making Google Cloud services harder to access in the region. The fire department handles electrical incidents with caution, but managed to put out the blaze within a few hours.

The region in question is specifically the europe-west9-a-region, which not only provides customers in Western Europe with a variety of services. Many cloud services rely on a global network of data centers, many of which run into trouble when one fails. Think cloud storage or part of the database that a cloud application addresses for specific purposes.

More than a fire

It is notable that the outage is lasting so long, given that data center owner Global Switch stated in late April that only “a very small portion of capacity” was affected by the water leak. Although The Register reports that French forum posters are speculating on the possibility that this is more than a fire, it is difficult to substantiate this without an official statement.

Data centers are more likely to experience outages due to fire, as well as heat waves, for example.