A fire at a third-party data centre in New Delhi that Google Cloud relies on triggered an emergency shutdown of networking equipment, disrupting network traffic across parts of India, the company said.

Traffic originating from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and surrounding areas is experiencing elevated latency and degraded network quality. Google Cloud said there was no workaround at the time.

“A fire at a third-party data center facility required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment, isolating a non-compute local Point of Presence (POP) in Delhi and reducing available network capacity in the metro area,” Google cloud said on its status page, adding that customers may experience slightly elevated latency and non-optimal network routing into Google Cloud until the affected facility is fully restored.

Google Cloud, one of the world’s largest cloud ⁠providers, competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It is used to run artificial intelligence tools, among other things.

The company said it rerouted significant traffic from the impacted facility to address reduced local serving capabilities. “As a result, a subset of Hybrid Connectivity and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers may be impacted by the routing changes made to address reduced local, latency-optimized serving capabilities in Delhi. Affected customers may experience intermittent latency spikes due to demand exceeding capacity across Indian metros and regional ISPs (internet service provider),” Google Cloud said.

“We are investigating additional traffic mitigations and Internet Edge peering augmentation to alleviate the latency issues affecting our customers,” it added.

👁 Customers may experience slightly elevated latency and non-optimal network routing into Google Cloud

Customers may experience slightly elevated latency and non-optimal network routing into Google CloudInternet Edge peering augmentation is the expansion of direct network interconnections at the edge of an internet service provider, cloud, or enterprise network. It involves adding bandwidth or new geographic nodes to bypass third-party transit providers, thereby reducing latency, preventing traffic congestion, and improving service resilience.

Heat intensive operations

Fire incidents have surged sharply in Delhi-NCR in the last few days, driven by overloaded electrical systems and continuous air conditioning usage during extreme summer heatwaves. Last week, a fire broke out at ST Telemedia’s data centre in Greater Kailash-1, which operated out of a building owned by Tata Communications. It led to disruptions in services by broadband service providers and tech companies, as well as damage to property.

Data centres are heat intensive operations due to the constant computing being carried out by servers. As a result, such facilities require intense cooling through air conditioners, and during summer, when the energy demand reaches its peak, it could result in some malfunctioning within a data centre’s electrical systems, industry experts said.

This spike in fire incidents, in some cases, is also exacerbated by building code violations, as was the case of a recent incident at a hotel in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, where a fire broke out. The incident killed 22 people, and the building was operating in violation of several norms.