Google Cloud outage in India after third-party data centre fire triggers shutdown

Alphabet’s Google Cloud said that some customers in India experienced intermittent network disruptions on Wednesday after a fire at a third-party data centre triggered an emergency shutdown of networking equipment.

The cloud-computing unit said the fire led to an emergency power shutdown at the facility, isolating a local point of presence in Delhi and reducing network capacity across the metropolitan area.

Google Cloud did not say when the fire occurred or whether it caused property damage or injuries.

Such disruptions can cascade across businesses and users, slowing apps, websites, and internal company systems.

The incident affected network traffic from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and nearby regions, causing periods of elevated latency, the company said on its status page.

Google Cloud, one of the world’s largest cloud providers, competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and is widely used to process large data volumes and run artificial intelligence tools.

There was no workaround while restoration efforts continue, the unit said, adding that it was exploring additional traffic mitigation measures to limit the impact.