Fire at Third-Party Data Centre in Delhi Hits Three Big Cities With Google Cloud Outage
New Delhi: A fire at a data-centre facility in New Delhi on June 9 led to an emergency shutdown of network equipment by Google Cloud services, affecting customers in India.
Google Cloud is one of the world's largest cloud providers along with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
According to the Google Cloud Service Health page, the "incident began" on June 9 at 11.22am, Pacific Standard Time, which is around 11.52 pm IST on June 9. However, this does not indicate that the fire started at that time or that the problem originated then.
A Reuters report has noted that Google had not revealed when the fire occurred.
Google said that the fire led to an emergency power shutdown at the New Delhi facility. This, in turn, isolated a local point of presence in Delhi. A point of presence is a physical access point between networks, which usually has essential networking equipment like routers and servers, and where high-speed connections to the internet are established.
This isolation at the cloud-computing unit ended up reducing network capacity across the metropolitan area.
The incident, however, affected at least three metro cities.
"Network traffic to Google Cloud originating from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and surrounding areas is experiencing intermittent periods of elevated latency and possible packet loss," the company stated.
While Google said it has rerouted significant traffic from the impacted facility in Delhi, it nonetheless led to intermittent latency spikes as demand exceeded capacity across Indian metros and regional Internet Service Providers. The Wire's English website, which saw an almost 12-hour outage, was among those affected.
"There is no workaround at this time," the report said. It is not clear if the issue has been solved yet.
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