Google Cloud Paris data center water intrusion (2023)

The Google Cloud Paris data center water intrusion is the late April 2023 incident that, followed by a fire, kept one zone of the europe-west9 region out of service for several weeks. During the night of April 25 to 26, 2023, water entered a data center in the Paris area that hosts part of Google Cloud's europe-west9 region, opened a little less than a year earlier. According to Google's incident report, the intrusion led to a fire in a technical room and the emergency shutdown of several systems. Beyond the affected zone, europe-west9-a, the region's other zones were also disrupted on the first day, because some regional services depended on the affected infrastructure. According to the press, the building is a colocation site run by a third party; Google has not officially confirmed it. The underwriter takes two readings from it. The first concerns the multi-zone promise: a region sold with three zones keeps shared dependencies that can take it down entirely, at least for a few hours. The second concerns the indemnity period. A customer that had everything on europe-west9-a with no replication saw its outage run far past the waiting period of a cyber policy, counted in hours, and contingent business interruption capped at a low sub-limit covered only a small share of weeks of downtime. Customers that had replicated their data to another region got away with a failover.