According to BBC News, Google has lost a small amount of data of its users as lightning repeatedly struck one of its data centers in Belgium. As a result, some people have permanently lost access to their files.
Charley David who works at Azendoo, a French start-up company, said his business was down for 12 hours. "Google recovered a small part of our data for us, but had to manually recover the biggest part ourselves," David told CNNMoney via email. With this incident, Google has urged its users to store data through other services that they also provide. Google has accepted full responsibility for the incident. "We have conducted a thorough analysis of the issue ... and we are working to improve these to maximize the reliability of GCE. We apologize to all our customers who were affected by this exceptional incident", Google said in an online statement. The company added it would continue to upgrade hardware and improve its response procedures to make future losses less likely.
The data centre powers the Google Compute Engine, a service for business customers who rely on Google's massive servers to perform high-powered computing tasks. On a positive note, no consumer-facing services like Gmail, YouTube or Google Drive were affected according to CNN.
According to BBC News, data centres generally require more lightning protection than most other buildings. While four successive strikes might sound highly unlikely, lightning does not need to repeatedly strike a building in exactly the same spot to cause additional damage. Justin Gale, project manager for the lightning protection service Orion, said lightning could strike power or telecommunications cables connected to a building at a distance and still cause disruptions. "The cabling alone can be struck anything up to a kilometre away, bring the shock back to the data centre and fuse everything that's in it," he said. Although chances of incidents like this from happening are quite low, users also have the option to back up data locally.
