Three injured in Google data centre explosion
Three people were critically injured as a result of an 'electrical event' at Iowa facility
An 'electrical incident' at a data centre in the United States caused injuries to at least three employees. Google says it was not linked to an outage today affecting Google Search, Trends and Maps.
The incident happened soon before midnight on Monday local time at the Google Data Centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
It occurred as electricians were working on a substation near the data centre buildings.
According to KETV Omaha, three patients were transported to Nebraska Medical Center in serious condition as a result of an explosion.
A Twitter account that claims to scan local police and fire department radio traffic said multiple persons have burn wounds.
"We are aware of an electrical incident that took place today at Google's data centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three people onsite who are now being treated," a Google spokesperson told KETV.
"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."
On Tuesday morning, a number of Google services, including Search and Trends, had a major outage worldwide.
When trying to search, several users got an error message. People flooded social media platforms in search of solutions to this unusual situation.
Over 40,000 Google Search outage difficulties were reported Tuesday morning, according to outage monitoring tool Downdetector.
Initial reports, including an earlier version of this article, suggested the two events were linked, but Google has denied this.
"The recent Google Search and Maps outage was not due to the incident in Iowa. As background, the cause of the Google Search and Maps was the result of an internal error and we don't have further details to share at this time," a spokesperson told Computing.
The incident comes only days after Google was forced to close its London data centre due to malfunctioning cooling equipment amid the record-breaking heat in July.
The incident occurred on 19th July when temperatures in several regions of the UK reached record highs of 40°C, with London hitting 39°C in the late afternoon.
One of the data centres was unable to maintain a safe operating temperature due to the concurrent breakdown of several redundant cooling systems and the very high external temperatures.
Google engineers worked to fix the failed system, but were unsuccessful. With temperatures remaining above 35°C into the evening, Google decided to shut part of the europe-west2-a zone to avoid an even longer outage or equipment damage.
Google operates 23 data centres worldwide, including 14 in the US.
This article was amended to include Google's assertion that the incident in the Iowa data centre and disruption to its services were not connected.