Technology
Google Cloud closes London outage incident, with a small number of customers still affected
Google’s incident record lists a seven-hour, 52-minute disruption and says most customers recovered. An investigation report is still pending.
What to know
- The recorded incident ran from 2:08 a.m. to 10 a.m. Eastern on October 20.
- Google attributed the disruption in its europe-west2-b zone to a power event.
- Some services in the wider London region experienced elevated errors or intermittent network problems.
- Google said it would publish an analysis after its internal investigation.
Google Cloud marked a London-region service incident closed Tuesday after a disruption lasting seven hours and 52 minutes. Its final incident update said most customers had recovered, while a very small number remained affected and engineers continued working with them.
What the status actually means
The affected area was a cloud region and zone, not a statement that every Google product failed worldwide. Google’s record lists numerous infrastructure services, including computing, storage and databases.
AP reported disruption at several U.K. banks. Reuters subsequently reported Google’s statement that service had been restored in the London region. The final official incident wording is more qualified for individual customers, so a closed incident should not be read as proof that every customer had fully recovered.
Why one location can matter elsewhere
An app’s users can live far from the infrastructure it relies on. The location of a cloud incident and the location of an affected customer are therefore different questions.
What happens next
Google’s promised incident analysis should provide a fuller account of the cause and response. Until that report appears, the confirmed explanation is the power event named in the status record; more detailed root-cause claims would be premature.
