Google explains why backup power failed in its London outage
Google's report says a cable fault cut one utility feed while the other was down for maintenance, and a voltage-sensing design flaw and PLC misconfiguration stopped generators starting; about 38 products in the London region were hit.
- Service
- Google Cloud (europe-west2)
- Date
- 20 October 2026
- Cause
- Power / cooling
- Duration
- Not stated or multi-day
- Status
- post-mortem
- Severity
- major
- Region
- UK
- Source
- The Register ↗
Cite this
Nuffield Consulting, “Google explains why backup power failed in its London outage”, The Daily Tech Wire outage & breach log, 20 Oct 2026. https://techwire.nuffieldconsulting.com/incidents/2026-10-20-google-cloud-europe-west2-outage/ (retrieved 15 Nov 2026).
This entry summarises public reporting. Please also cite the original source: The Register, https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/11/05/when-datacenters-lose-power-generators-should-kick-in-that-didnt-happen-for-google-in-london/5307739.
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