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A 3-millisecond micro-outage left a European Google Cloud zone without service for almost 15 hours

Google Cloud published on July 25 the report on the incident that on July 15 interrupted several services in the europe-west4-a zone.
July 25, 2026
Curated Medium

What it says

  • Google Cloud VMware Engine, Bare Metal Solution, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes suffered outages totaling 14 hours and 55 minutes.
  • Root cause: a 3-millisecond voltage dip in the utility's supply, which tripped the breakers of both feeds, A and B.
  • Feed B switched to the backup system (a diesel rotary UPS) without interruption; the backup for A failed because of faulty electrical components. From there came the loss of cooling, the rise in temperature, and the shutdown of equipment.
  • In VMware Engine it affected 24 private clouds of 20 customers in that zone; in Bare Metal Solution, 9 customers.

The Tech Guardian summarizes and comments in its own words on third-party publications. The full information belongs to the original source, which we recommend you read.

Our take

The affected services are the ones many companies use to move their legacy systems to the cloud as they are, and they usually live in a single zone. If you have workloads like that, check that your continuity plan covers losing an entire zone for a day, not just a server. The provider's power redundancy also fails, and the report proves it.

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