Google Lost Data Due to Lightning Strikes

There’s an old idiom that suggests lighting fixtures in no way strikes the identical location twice. Apparently it’s one that Google never queried as certainly one of its facts facilities in Belgium these days lost records following 4 successive lightning moves courtesy of mom Nature.

The incident in question befell remaining week, inflicting a brief loss of strength to storage systems that host potential for Google Compute Engine (GCE) instances for the vicinity. The hunt massive stated in an incident report that automatic auxiliary systems quick restored power and even though the systems have been also on battery backup, some garage structures have been attached to battery backups that had skilled extended or repeated battery drain.

Google stated manual intervention changed into required to restore the systems to their ordinary nation and alas, a small amount of information became permanently lost.

The company stated it takes full duty for the records loss and is the use of the incident to remind users that GCE instances and continual disks inside a area exist in a unmarried statistics middle. As such, they're inevitably prone to data center-scale failures inclusive of this.

Google said it's also in the process of upgrading to garage hardware this is much less susceptible to the strength failure mode that precipitated the incident.

The unlucky episode serves as a reminder to returned up your essential information in an offline location. It’s additionally now not a terrible concept to unplug your laptop from its strength source for the duration of a thunderstorm or different risky climate event that could result in an electrical surge.