Act of God damaged data on Google cloud disks Google has admitted that some customers running Persistent Disks in its europe-west1-b region have been forced to recover data from snapshots after a combination of lightning and old storage kit was is to blame. The outage hit last Friday and left some users unable to connect Persistent Disks – a disk that exists independently …
This post has been deleted by its author
Most likely on the pylons that feed it. Typically they are the highest thing around even on plains and if you have a big storm you can get several bolts all in a few km region. Even though it is more common to hit the pylon than cable, you are still talking about serious levels of induced surges and possible disconnected by circuit breakers as a result.
It's probably in Central Europe.
There's a reason why the house I had in CZ was covered in effing great lightning conductors, as were all the others in that area.
Power outages due to electrical cables, substations and such being repeatedly struck[1] were all too common.
[1] Or, on one memorable occasion, struck once very, very hard. I saw the bolt and it was like the finger of god.
"is the data centre on top of a mountain? hard to believe otherwise"
In his autobiography "Just a simple seaman" - Andrew Parks describes a thunderstorm that hit Frome Grammar School in England in the 1950s. As it started raining two groups of boys were instructed to carry some gymnastics equipment from a field back to the gymnasium. As the second group approached the school there was lightning strike on the building gable - dislodging some masonry. Moments later the building was struck again. The third lightning strike was in the field - directly into the first group of boys on their third trip. One boy was killed.
You better make sure the connection to earth is robust, and for a mobile electrode there's no substitute to mass for that. May I suggest one of our lovely new ball-and-chain models (now with surge-resistant anti-static shackles)...? We even have an extra-long-chain version to ensure safe ground dissipation as far from you as possible!
I wonder what Google's T's&C's have in them about data loss caused by angry deities, or if they have insurers frowning at the increasing number of times Gods have tried to destroy Google. (Thort for the day: What's in the search/browser history of a God?)
"Incident: Disruption to Google's eastern datacentre caused by dimensional incursion of daemonic army. Minor disruption while HR conducted interviews, and dealt with objections from Illuminati and Templar Union reps."
The storm was on Friday. "Problems persisted through the weekend." All of my system was working precisely and smoothly through late on Tuesday night, around midnight. (I am in Belgium at the moment.) On Wednesday morning I woke up to a fried browser. Nothing worked. Seems very strange to have it take so long for the data loss to trickle down into my system... Most bizarre.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
