Lightning strikes, major power outage wipes out data in Google ‘s European Computer Engine datacentre

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Google has told Cloud Engine customers to build in redundancy to their cloud apps after a major power outage hit its European datacentre.

Google said the outage at its European Google Compute Engine (GCE) datacentre was caused by four consecutive lightning strikes that hit the grid powering it last Thursday. While the company has taken full responsibility for the outage, it has also told customers who suffered downtime they shouldn’t be relying on a single compute zone.

The incident also caused the permanent loss of some data from ‘persistent disks’ — the term it uses for a certain type of storage for virtual machine instances hosted on GCE — in its europe-west1-b zone, located in St Ghislain, Belgium.

Google said in its analysis of the outage that between 13 August and 17 August, a small portion of the disks were sporadically returning I/O errors to their attached GCE instances as well as experiencing errors in snapshot creation. In total, five percent of its ‘standard persistent disks’ in the zone were experiencing the issues, however by Monday, “less than 0.000001 percent of the space of allocated persistent disks” remained affected, Google said.

Adapted from ZDnet

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