Google Cloud experienced a partial outage in the us-central1-b region on September 1, from 07:41 to 11:52 PT. The incident was caused by a technician technician who physically disconnected all fiber optic cables during routine maintenance work.
The company reported that traffic volume in the affected area dropped to 0% during the peak of the incident. This led to severe network degradation and the isolation of resources, making several instances unavailable to users and increasing packet loss.
Google explained that while their data centers are designed for double or triple redundancy of routers, power supplies, and fiber optic lines, these protections were bypassed by the physically removing the cables from their sockets.
To resolve the issue, Google redirected traffic from the disconnected routers to functional capacities in other parts of the region. The network's original configuration was restored after the technician reconnected the cables.
