It's nearly impossible for lightning to strike the same place more than once, but a Google data center in Europe became the very unfortunate target of four lightning strikes that damaged a small amount of disks containing client information.
A Google Compute Engine (GCE) data center in Belgium was struck by lightning four times within a single week, beginning on Thursday, Aug. 13, up to Tuesday, Aug. 17, causing power outages and permanently damaging disks that were used to contain files for unidentified GCE clients.
GCE is Google's answer to the Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure and provides a cloud platform for enterprise clients to store and develop their online applications and businesses. Although Google says it was able to successfully recover the data affected by the lightning strikes, 0.000001 percent of the disk space remained permanently unrecoverable, and Google says it is taking full responsibility for the damage.
"This outage is wholly Google's responsibility," said Google in a lengthy statement about the incident. "Google takes availability very seriously, and the durability of storage is our highest priority. We apologize to all our customers who were affected by this exceptional incident."
The company also says it is evaluating new measures to improve the reliability of Google's whole storage layer. Currently, Google's storage systems are equipped with backup battery in case the power systems are knocked out in the event of a disaster. Moreover, Google's data centers have their own automatic auxiliary systems that will restore power immediately after a blackout.
However, Google says some of the data that was lost to the lightning strikes were located in storage systems that were more susceptible to power failure because of repeated or extended battery drains.
Although the chances of a person being struck by lightning are small, data centers are more prone to being nuked. In an interview with the BBC, Orion's Justin Gale, project manager for lightning protection service, says lightning can strike cable systems that are connected to a building and still cause a lot of damage, even to data centers, which are outfitted with a network of conductive lightning rods to ward off electrical damage.
"The cabling alone can be struck anything up to a kilometer away, bring [the shock] back to the data center and fuse everything that's in it," Gale explained.
For this reason, Google recommends to clients who require maximum availability to use GCE snapshots and Google Cloud Storage to back up their data in case another bolt of lightning strikes again.
Photo: Anthony Quintano | Flickr
