Fire and flood disrupt Google Cloud at Paris data centre

What happened

A cooling system water pump failure at the Global Switch data centre in Clichy released water into the battery room in the early hours of 25 April 2023. The water affected battery components and caused a fire. Emergency services attended and contained the fire after it had burned for some time. The incident led to a multi-cluster failure and an extended outage affecting Google Cloud's europe-west9 region, with more than 100 services affected at first. Air conditioning systems were restored later that day, but fire teams cooled external walls rather than entering the battery room. No injuries were reported.

Contributing factors

A failure in the air conditioning systems led to an unexpected water release into the battery room. Water then affected battery components and started the fire.

Lessons learned

1. Data centre operators should ensure battery rooms are protected from water ingress from adjacent systems.
2. Fire suppression and response procedures must account for safe access delays after battery fires.
3. Cloud regions should be designed so that a single facility event does not take down every availability zone.

Source

itpro.com