According to the comprehensive US media, at noon on the 8th local time, the Google data center in Iowa, US, exploded, injuring three people, and has now been sent to the hospital.
The cause of the accident is still under investigation. The media reported that three electricians had an arc flash (electrical explosion) while working in a substation near the data center building. Google provided a statement to the media to confirm the accident, and stressed that the health and safety of all employees is the top priority of the company. At present, it is working closely with partners and the local government to thoroughly investigate the situation and provide necessary assistance.
It is reported that Google has 14 data centers in the United States and 23 in the world. The center in Concell Braves, Iowa, opened in 2009 and is one of Google's largest data centers.
Google's search service failed on the evening of the 8th local time, but it is unclear whether there is a connection between the two events.
Devon Smiley, a spokesman for Google, made a statement: "We know that today there was a power accident at Google's data center in Conselbaufs, Iowa, which caused three injuries and is currently receiving treatment.
After the accident, according to Downdetector.com, a downtime tracking website, more than 40000 people in the United States reported that they could not use Google search, but then the number declined.
Many users have posted screenshots of Google's errors on Twitter. The topic of "# Google down" was once hot on Twitter, and many users have posted screenshots of downtime messages.
In addition, users in the UK, Australia and Singapore also reported Google downtime. The web service detection website shows that the search interruption time is about 30 to 40 minutes.
In addition to Google's search engine failure, according to DownDetector, thousands of people reported that Google Maps also failed. In addition, there are users on Twitter who claim that Gmail and Google Pictures have also failed.
The network intelligence company ThousandEyes Inc reported that Google's failure affected at least 1338 servers in more than 40 countries/regions around the world, including the United States, Australia, South Africa, Kenya, Israel, parts of South America, Europe and parts of Asia.
Many foreign media speculate that this may be related to the power accident in the morning, but Google has not replied whether there is a connection between the outage and the explosion.
It is understood that Google has 14 large data centers in the United States and 23 in the world. These data centers "keep all Google products and services running around the clock". The data center in Council Bluffs is one of the largest data centers, which was first opened in 2009. The project investment in Iowa is up to US $5 billion (about 33.2 billion yuan), which is much higher than the cost of other centers of US $1 billion to US $2 billion. It should be very important.
It is worth mentioning that not long ago, the data center where Google hosted one of its London cloud regions encountered "multiple redundant cooling systems failed simultaneously". Google did not disclose the specific cause of the failure, but said its engineers were analyzing the system that caused the event, and would review the cooling system equipment and standards of the data center where Google Cloud is located worldwide.
Subsequently, Google shut down part of the system equipment in this area to prevent longer interruptions or machine damage, which caused some capacity failures in this area, leading to instance termination, service degradation and network problems for some customers.
Google said that its team "unintentionally modified the traffic routing of internal services" to avoid all three regions in western Europe. Regional storage services (including GCS and BigQuery) replicate customer data across multiple regions. Due to changes in regional traffic routing, no copies of many storage objects can be accessed, and customers are prevented from reading these objects when routing errors occur.