It was recently reported that Google’s new cloud region in Melbourne was taken out by transient voltage last Tuesday.
Indeed, Google had launched the cloud region, australia-southeast2, in July in order to accelerate the nation’s digital transformation. However, barely a month later, the region was announced to be down as users lost the ability to create new VMs in the Google Cloud Engine. Load balancers and cloud storage also became unavailable.
Up to 23 services were stated to experience issues according to Google’s final analysis of the incident. The issue was fixed quickly and some services came back to normal, but some were hard to use for a few hours afterward.
The company reported that the incident was due to a failure of Public IP traffic connectivity and transient voltage at the feeder to the network equipment, which caused the equipment to reboot. Transient voltage is an activity that witnessed huge but short spikes of energy.
Data centers are supposed to be built to survive it, however, Google’s region was taken out after only a month, showing the weaknesses of the cloud.
