On August 12, 2024, Google experienced a power outage at its London data center, leading to a notable disruption of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Workspace services for UK users. The outage, which lasted over two hours, primarily affected essential GCP services, including Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, Hybrid Connectivity, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). From 06:20 to 07:00 US/Pacific, users reported intermittent timeouts, identified by 500 error codes, followed by a period of elevated latency in the europe-west2 region, lasting until 08:32 US/Pacific.
Connectivity problems were particularly severe for customers using Cloud Interconnect zones in London, as well as those relying on certain Partner Interconnects, resulting in complete service losses. During this time, Google Workspace users experienced difficulties accessing key applications such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Meet, and Google Tasks for approximately 40 minutes.
Google has publicly apologized for the inconvenience caused, attributing the outage to a loss of power impacting networking equipment within the data center. A detailed incident report, along with a comprehensive root cause analysis, will be made available to affected users soon.