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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →The Google Cloud outage in Paris on 25–26 April 2023 was caused by a cooling-system water leak that reached an associated UPS room and led to a fire. Shutting down the affected building exposed a resilience problem: Regional Spanner replicas were not correctly distributed across the three buildings in the europe-west9 region, so the service lost quorum. The resulting disruption was regional, although some global management operations were also affected.
How the fire and flood began
Google’s incident report says a water pipe in a cooling system leaked at a data center in europe-west9, Google Cloud’s Paris region. The leak began in a portion of the facility not operated by Google, entered an associated uninterruptible power supply (UPS) room, and led to a fire.
The facility had to be evacuated, the local fire department responded, and power to the entire building was shut down for several hours. The affected europe-west9-a cluster sustained water intrusion and smoke damage. This was not simply a fire that took down all of Google Cloud: the main service disruption was in the Paris region.
Why one building’s shutdown affected so many services
Google says europe-west9 comprised three buildings with independent cooling, power, and networking. That physical separation was not enough to preserve the regional control plane: the replicas for Regional Spanner were not correctly spread across the buildings to maintain quorum after the affected building was powered down.
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Regional Spanner supported the regional control plane for most Google Cloud services in the region. Its quorum loss interrupted control-plane services and contributed to unavailability or elevated error rates across many services. Google reported a peak 100% traffic-flow drop rate for resources hosted in the affected area. That figure describes the affected area at the peak, not a platform-wide error rate or Google Cloud’s overall reliability.
The incident report says 79% of Regional Persistent Disk volumes in europe-west9 had one replica in the impacted building. No Regional Persistent Disk volume had both replicas in that building. The 79% figure describes replica placement; it does not mean that those volumes lost customer data.
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How long the outage lasted and how services recovered
Google’s incident record lists the outage start as 16:46 US/Pacific on 25 April 2023 and its end as 20:00 US/Pacific on 26 April. The battery-room fire was extinguished at 04:11 on 26 April. Recovery then proceeded in stages rather than all at once:
| Service or milestone | Reported time, 26 April 2023 (US/Pacific) |
|---|---|
| Regional Spanner quorum restored | 12:47 |
| Regional IAM restored | 14:42 |
| Google Cloud Storage regional services restored | 15:14 |
| Pub/Sub restored | 15:30 |
| BigQuery restored | 17:10 |
| Dataflow restored | 18:40 |
| Compute Engine control-plane services across all zones restored | 19:00 |
| Incident record lists outage end | 20:00 |
Google described the region as primarily recovered and operational after the 19:00 Compute Engine milestone. The separate 20:00 end time is the incident record’s listed end, not a claim that every service recovered at that moment.
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Which services and customers were affected
Google’s report names disruptions at different stages across Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Persistent Disk, Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, Cloud Spanner, Bigtable, Filestore, Apigee, Artifact Registry, Cloud Run and related services, BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, IAM, and Cloud Console, among others. IT Pro described more than 100 affected services in its 27 April 2023 report; that is a separate count from Google’s detailed service list.
Google described a temporary global Cloud Console outage and failures in some global operations. Those effects do not mean every Google Cloud region was unavailable: the principal incident was in europe-west9, with some global-scope management and fanout operations also affected.
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Did Google Cloud lose customer data?
No customer data loss was reported for this incident. Google said it recovered all zonal data before decommissioning the water- and smoke-damaged cluster in europe-west9-a, and its incident report states: “Customers experienced no data loss from the incident.” That statement is limited to this event.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What Google said it would change
Google’s incident report described follow-up actions and plans, but does not establish that every item was later completed. The actions span both physical-site response and service resilience:
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- Physical risk and recovery: analyze water-intrusion risks across data centers, evaluate drip trays in relevant multi-story facilities, and refine the fire-and-flood recovery playbook.
- Failure-domain placement and testing: improve zonal and regional failure testing and validate that resources are placed across physical failure domains as intended.
- Control-plane resilience: improve graceful degradation for APIs that require all regions and zones, and keep Cloud Console operational when a control-plane scope is unavailable.
How to check Google Cloud status now
The April 2023 Paris outage is resolved, not ongoing. As checked on 4 October 2026, Google’s public Google Cloud Service Health dashboard said “No broad severe incidents” and showed an update time of 4 October 2026, 13:57 PDT. That is a point-in-time view of broad incidents; it cannot confirm whether a narrower event affected a particular project.
For project-relevant disruptions, Google recommends Personalized Service Health as the primary source. Google documents project-aware dashboard views, configurable alerts for incident posts, updates, and resolution, API access to active disruptive events, and Cloud Logging integrations. The incident-management documentation advises checking the public dashboard manually if Personalized Service Health is unavailable and using the public RSS feed for automated fallback. These are Google’s documented status and alerting channels, not a substitute for a workload-specific disaster-recovery plan.
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