Google’s europe-west1-b data center recently experienced power fluctuations that led to the permanent loss of some data stored on its cloud computing service. Lightning struck the building’s power grid four times, leading to a power outage. Although the backups kicked in, “some recently written data was located on storage systems which were more susceptible to power failure from extended or repeated battery drain,” and some of that data was lost, Google said.
Google says that less than 0.000001 percent of the Google Compute Engine data stored at the facility. However, given the size of Google’s data stores, it could be as much as several gigabytes. The company said it was already working on upgrading its systems to make them less susceptible to data loss after power outages when the problem occurred. The affected storage systems had not been upgraded yet.
