Three people were injured in an incident at one of Google’s data centres in the US state of Iowa. They had to be taken to hospital, according to local media.
It is not yet clear whether this incident is related to the temporary crash of Google’s website and search engine on Monday evening. However, many people reported a malfunction around the same time.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has not yet responded extensively to the incident. A spokesperson told SFGate, a local San Francisco media outlet, that he was only aware of “an electrical incident that occurred at Google’s data centre in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where three people were injured and are now being treated.” However, some media are reporting an explosion in the data centre.
On the Downdetector website, where people can report malfunctions, more than 40,000 reports were received on Monday evening around 9 p.m. New York time. Google’s website wouldn’t load, and people said they couldn’t perform searches either. Problems were also reported in Taiwan and Japan. This kind of malfunction of the site and search engine of Google is rare. An hour later, the problems were solved.
The British newspaper The Guardian reported that there were also problems with the Google services Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images. Google said a software update caused problems and apologized for the problems.
