Google engineer unplugged every fiber they could see and – surprise! – took down a chunk of the G-Cloud
This sounds like a RTFM error at hyperscale
Google Cloud experienced a partial outage in its us-central1-b region on September 1, between 07:41 and 11:52 PT. The incident caused "severe network degradation and resource isolation," with traffic flow drop rates reaching 100% for resources hosted in the affected area. Google's service health report revealed that the engineers physically disconnected every fiber-optic cable within the region during a routine hardware maintenance procedure.
This prevented warnings of incorrect action from reaching the engineer before complete disconnection.
The immediate technical trigger for the event was the unplugging of 100% of fiber paths across all devices within a span of 13 minutes. Once Google noticed the situation, it moved traffic away from the disconnected routers and its resilience provisions kicked in, automatically directing traffic to healthy capacity elsewhere in the region.
Technicians identified the disconnected optical links and physically reseated the fibers. After restoring the physical links, traffic flow rates normalized and capacity was redirected back to service.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
