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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
National
Aisha Down

‘Too big to not fail’: Google outage exposes UK reliance on a handful of cloud providers

Google technician checks a laptop between illuminated server racks in a datacentre
A Google technician diagnoses an overheated CPU at a datacentre in Dalles, Oregon. Photograph: Google Handout/EPA

It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London, and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app.

The datacentre in question was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone, one of more than a dozen “zones” that the US search giant maintains in Europe to service its clients.

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