Late Monday night, an electrical explosion occurred in a section of a Google data center in Omaha, Nebraska, injuring three staff members and causing a global outage
According to reports, three workers at a Google data centre in Iowa were injured in a blast, according to the outlet.
The workers, all electricians, were taken to the hospital after suffering severe burns following an electrical explosion near the data facility, the report said. An electrical incident caused an ‘arc flash,’ a common occurrence.
One of the electricians is said to be in critical condition.
Council Bluffs, Iowa, posted on Twitter Tuesday evening informing the public about the accident and the condition of the injured individuals.
The post says that one electrician suffered burns to his face, left arm, and leg, in addition to a leg injury.
According to Omaha World Herald local publication, Council Bluffs Assistant Fire Chief Jim Wood reported that first responders were called to a data centre at 11:59 am following an electrical incident.
First responders were alerted to a ‘large explosion,’ as revealed by scanner traffic, but Mr Wood did not provide specifics, according to the outlet.
All of the patients were conscious and able to communicate, according to Mr. Wood.
The fire department is investigating the incident to determine its cause. Google’s data centre, one of the company’s biggest facilities, is located near Lake Manawa State Park. It houses hundreds of supercomputers, which are high-tech computers that analyse large quantities of data.
A Google Spokesperson said the health and safety of all workers is our absolute top priority, and we are working closely with partners and local authorities to thoroughly investigate the situation and provide assistance as needed.
How servcies were effected by the outage
The effected services included:
- Google Search
- Google Maps
- YouTube
There was an increase in Google-related outage issues recorded by Downdector around the time of the incident, which mostly affected Google Search, but Maps and YouTube also saw modest increases in reports.
30,000 people reported issues with Google in the U.S., shortly after the electrical incident.
It’s not clear whether these incidents were related to the explosion, and Google hasn’t offically announced service disruptions in connection with the unfortunate event.
Rising temperatures often lead to data center outages
There are many reasons why data centers can be taken down. Just last month, Google and Oracle data centres in the U.K. were knocked out due to the record-breaking heat wave.
The outages at Google’s data centre in London were caused by problems with the cooling system, which resulted in overheating.
To prevent damage to equipment, Google was forced to power down some cloud services in London. A cooling failure at Oracle’s London data centre led the company to power down noncritical hardware to prevent uncontrolled hardware failures.
Google Cloud has 34 existing cloud regions to help local companies serve their global users with many of the tech giants hyperscale data centres house thousands of servers, storage, and networking infrastructure.
In the second quarter of 2022, Google Cloud revenue exceeded $6 billion for the first time and now has an annualized run rate of over $25 billion.
