Google Cloud customers are witnessing a network disruption across several major Indian cities, and the reason behind this is a fire incident at one of the data centres belonging to a third-party partner.
The outage, which highlights the vulnerabilities in the country’s rapidly expanding digital infrastructure once again, continues to plague consumers at the time of writing, and Google states that there’s no workaround for the situation as of now. The company, however, is working on a fix to get the work done.
The incident involving fire forced an emergency power shutdown at the facility, isolating a local point of presence in Delhi and significantly reducing network capacity in the metropolitan area, and also affecting services in Chennai, Mumbai and other nearby regions.
Google Cloud outage: Incident details and immediate impact
The Google Cloud division confirmed that customers experienced intermittent network disruptions, with elevated latency and possible packet loss impacting traffic originating from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, and surrounding regions. The company’s status page noted that no immediate workaround is available. The Cloud teams are actively working on restoration and exploring additional traffic mitigation measures.
Google Cloud has not released details on the exact timing, extent of damage, or any injuries. Note that such third-party dependencies are common in cloud operations, where providers lease connectivity and colocation space from local infrastructure specialists.
Businesses relying on Google Cloud for applications, data processing, websites, and internal systems have reported slowdowns the moment the issue emerged. In India’s digital economy, even brief outages can affect e-commerce platforms, fintech services, logistics, and government digital initiatives. Sectors like IT services, startups, and AI development, which heavily depend on reliable cloud connectivity, are particularly sensitive.
Server disruptions are common
This incident is not the first of its kind. Data centre fires and power-related disruptions have occurred globally and in India before. The latest incident highlights once again the risks from ageing infrastructure, urban density, and increasing power demands from AI-driven computing. Analysts and experts states that while hyperscalers like Google Cloud maintain redundancies, reliance on third-party points of presence can create single points of failure during localised emergencies.
At the moment, Google Cloud remains one of the top global providers, powering everything from enterprise databases to advanced machine learning tools. The company competes with Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure.
In the meantime, users are advised to monitor official status pages for updates.