When datacenters lose power, generators should kick in. That didn’t happen for Google in London

Google Cloud has revealed that the cause of the October 20 outage in its europe-west-2-b availability zone was a ‘misconfiguration’ of its systems that meant its emergency generators didn’t start.The outage at the London facility caused service interruptions at outfits including Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail, and Revolut.In a November 4 update to its service status page, Google explained what went wrong.“The site relies on a 2N utility power architecture — where the facility has complete duplicate power paths for every critical load — backed by a central high-voltage generator bank managed by a dual-redundant Programmable Logic Controller (PLC),” Google revealed.The facility gets its juice from two independent utility feeders,...

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