A Google Cloud Platform center in Belgium was pushed to its limits and ultimately lost some data after four consecutive lightning strikes.No consumer-facing services, such as Gmail, YouTube or Google Drive, were affected.
Google called the situation an “exceptional incident”.Google also admits that this outage is wholly it’s responsibility.The company conducted audits to determine what went wrong in its lightning protections and backup power systems and says it plans to upgrade its equipment.
About 5% of the disks in the data center were experiencing I/O errors. It was able to restore many of the drives to working condition and salvage the data, but 0.000001% of the data in europe-west1-b was irrecoverably lost.
Google’s confessional also says the company “has an ongoing program of upgrading to storage hardware that is less susceptible to the power failure mode that triggered this incident.