Last week, Google Cloud’s europe-west4-a region went dark for a total of 14 hours and 55 minutes. The outage began when a data center in the Netherlands lost utility power, which in turn knocked out cooling capacity, forcing Google to power down its equipment.
Google Cloud explained in a status update that the service interruption was caused by an electrical fault on the utility grid upstream of the data center. This disrupted electrical distribution and cooling equipment, resulting in ambient temperatures skyrocketing. Host servers, storage clusters, and network switches were all quickly powered down to prevent damage caused by high temperatures.
“We sincerely apologize for the disruption this incident caused to your business. We know how much you rely on Google Cloud, and we regret the impact on your productivity,” Google Cloud wrote in a preliminary incident report.
The firm reports that the service interruption began on July 15 when the Google Cloud NetApp Volumes became the first to go offline and stayed offline for 8 hours and 31 minutes. Shortly thereafter, its VMware Engine service went offline for 9 hours and 24 minutes, and the Bare Metal Solution product was offline for nearly 13 hours.
Google Cloud says its engineers worked with the third-party facility provider to restore primary utility power, “returning ambient room temperatures to safe operational levels.” Field support engineers and remote teams systematically booted and verified server hosts, storage nodes, and the network fabric in a controlled sequence.
“The underlying infrastructure has been fully recovered, and normal operations have been successfully restored,” Google said.
Google’s europe-west4-a region operates from Eemshaven, Netherlands, where it has its own data center that opened in 2016. The firm’s phrasing suggests that this outage happened at a “third-party facility provider”, so it’s unclear where exactly the facility that experienced the utility power outage is located.
Last month, w.media reported that a fire broke out at Next-Gen Tower in New Delhi, India, a facility operated by ST Telemedia Global Data Centres on space leased by Tata Communications. The blaze on June 5, 2026, forced Google to shut down network equipment, triggering elevated latency and rerouting for Google Cloud users in the region. Google restored normal network service by late June, while Tata Communications worked to recover affected customers’ data.