Water intrusion in europe-west9-a has caused a multi-cluster failure and has led to an emergency shutdown of multiple zones. We expect general unavailability of the europe-west9 region
Do they have an official description what a zone is somewhere?
Back in the days when we had our own data centers a zone was defined as a "fire section" meaning that it should not be impacted if any other zone of the data center had a fire. This obviously means that you can't call 3 floors of a building a zone.
Physically distinct could refer to distinct hardware in the same building and cage space. It’s “physically distinct”. Google makes no promises that the zones are in different buildings or separated by N feet/miles of space.
Switching off all of 1 zone and checking the others aren't impacted is literally step 1 of checking your organisation is truly zonally redundant...
Someone as big as Google ought to have been practicing this automatically every week in a staging environment, and probably at least annually in production.
It happened at GlobalSwitch Clichy, near Paris. From what I gathered from a french forum[1], it started with a flood and then a fire. No rooms have been affected, apparently.
Cooling pump failure lead to water leaking into the UPS room. Batteries caught fire and firefighters can't access the room. Fire is contained although.
It is the Clichy's one. It's not that dug into, where did you get that from? (Used to work there circa 2010). I think the water retention made its way to the battery rooms. No recent floods (nor rain) in Paris (nor most of france) lately.