Three workers injured in an electrical ‘incident’ at Google data centre – Times of India

Three electricians were injured in an “electrical incident” at a Google data center in Iowa, US, according to a report in SFGate. The report, quoting Council Bluffs Police Department and Google, said that all three injured were taken to hospital.
The incident occurred at 11:59 a.m. local time on Monday, the Council Bluffs Police Department told the publication. The three electricians were working on a substation close to the data center buildings when the electric explosion occurred. “We are aware of an electrical incident that took place today at Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three people onsite who are now being treated. 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,” Google spokesperson Devon Smiley said.
“We own and operate data centers around the world to keep our products running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” says Google. The company has 24 data centers around the world. Of these 15 are in the US, 6 in Europe and 2 in Asia (Singapore and Taiwan). The Council Bluffs data centre is one of Google’s largest. It was announced in the year 2007.
Google services outage
Earlier today some Google services including Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail and Google Photos went down for some users in the US. While all these services suffered down time. Most affected was Google Search. Though some reports linked the outage to explosion at Iowa data centre, Google has not made any official statement regarding the same. Google, however, did acknowledge the outage. In a statement, Google spokesperson said, “We’re aware of a software update issue that occurred late this afternoon Pacific Time and briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps.” “We apologise for the inconvenience. We worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online,” the statement added.