Google Data Center Fire: At about 9:30 pm Eastern Time, Google had a widespread outage with Google Search. This issue continued through the night, and efforts to restore the service seemed to mitigate some of the connectivity issues many have experienced.
However, their issues did not stop there. Unfortunately, this also seemed to result in a cascade of other issues with Google Search around search quality and rankings.
What happened?
It appears that a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa USA caught fire, and the result of the fire sadly injured some of their workers and also caused issues in Google Search. The incident occurred at 11:59 a.m. local time on Monday, the Council Bluffs Police Department told SFGATE.
A Google spokesperson said:
“We are aware of an electrical incident that took place today at Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three people onsite who are now being treated. The health and safety of all workers is our absolute top priority, and we are working closely with partners and local authorities to thoroughly investigate the situation and provide assistance as needed.”
Google is aware
Google is aware of the issue, as you can see from the statement above. Additionally, Google is also aware of the overall Google Search issues related to this fire. John Mueller from Google commented on Twitter about how things should come back to normal as restoration efforts are underway.
Google Search issues
It seems that the outage, although the most noticeable issue, is not the only issue. I’ve seen issues with the overall search results impacting search quality.
These issues include:
– Outages and inaccessibility of Google Search
– Old pages dropping out of Google Search
– New pages not being indexed by Google Search
– Google Search results look stale and outdated
– Huge ranking fluctuations
If you notice ranking changes, both positive or negative, or big swings in traffic from Google Search, this might be why. Things should return to normal as this issue gets resolved but it is unclear how long it will take for everything to come back to the state it was prior to this fire.
Our thoughts are with those Google employees who were injured in this data center fire.
