Google Cloud's europe-west3-c zone in its cloud region in Frankfurt, Germany, is back online after a 12-hour outage.

First reported by The Register, the outage began at 2:30am local time on Thursday, October 24, and ended at 3.09pm, more than 12 hours later.

Google Cloud
– Sebastian Moss

In a Mini Incident Report, Google acknowledged the outage and said: "We apologize for the inconvenience this service disruption/outage may have caused."

The report added that "from preliminary analysis, the root cause of the issue was due to a power failure and cooling issue leading to a fraction of a zone being powered down causing services to be degraded."

The company has brought the data center back to full operation and plans to complete a full incident report in the coming days. DCD has reached out to Google for further information.

Customers lost access to virtual machines and disks in the availability zone. The other two zones in the region were less affected, with Google reporting less than one percent of operations experiencing internal errors.

Higher latency and delays with batch jobs were also an issue, Google Cloud said.

Google's Frankfurt cloud region launched in 2017. In 2021, the cloud giant announced plans to expand the region and develop another region in Berlin, which was launched in 2023.

This year has seen Google suffer a couple of incidents. In August 2024, Google services including Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Meet went down for a subset of users due to an issue with Cloud CDN, Cloud Load Balancing, and Hybrid Connectivity in its UK (europe-west2) region.

In May, the company accidentally deleted Australian superannuation fund UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription, causing a week-long outage.