Lightning Strikes Results in Data Loss at Google Data Centre

The Google data centre in Belgium faced power failure last Thursday as four consecutive lightning struck the local electrical grid. Automatic backup systems launched immediately and restored power quickly, however, in the short downtime, 5% of the Standard Persistent Discs experienced some degree of failure. As Google engineers began data recovery operations, much of the data was restored. However, 0.000001% of data was unrecoverable and remains permanently affected. The amount of information expected to be affected by the data loss remains only a fraction of the total information stored.

It might not seem like a lot, but if that 0.000001% of data was your data, this comes as bad news. Google took full responsibility for the incident, but reminded customers that if they need complete availability, they should duplicate their important data across multiple regions or zones, to better protect against data loss, or to use “disc snapshots”. Many affected users were luckily able to restore their data from local backups, highlighting the importance of regularly backing up any information.

Google has said that they are in the process of upgrading storage hardware to better protect them from outages of this data. Google engineers also began running full reviews of the data centre technology to seek further methods of improving durability and security for the future.

Google apologized for the outage, stating: “Google takes availability very seriously, and the durability of storage is our highest priority. We apologise to all our customers who were affected by this exceptional incident.”