A fire at a third-party data center in Delhi forced an emergency power shutdown on June 9, knocking out networking equipment that serves Google Cloud’s asia-south2 region. The result: intermittent latency spikes and possible packet loss for users across Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, and surrounding areas.
Google Cloud acknowledged the disruption on its service health dashboard, noting reduced network capacity in the region. The incident began at approximately 11:22 AM US/Pacific and isolated what Google describes as a non-compute local Point of Presence, or POP. In English: a networking node that helps route traffic efficiently got cut off, but the actual compute servers stayed online.
What actually went down
Companies like Google frequently lease space in third-party colocation facilities, essentially shared data centers operated by other companies, to optimize connectivity in specific regions. When those third-party facilities have problems, the ripple effects can be surprisingly targeted. In this case, the fire triggered an emergency power shutdown that took out networking gear at a single POP.
The disruption was real but narrowly scoped. Google was careful to characterize the impact as intermittent, not a full service outage. Compute layers, meaning the actual processing power customers pay for, remained operational.
