Google Cloud Outage Hits Netherlands Region After Power and Cooling Failure

Google Cloud suffered a significant outage in its Europe-West4 availability zone after a power and cooling failure at a data center in the Netherlands, disrupting services for nearly 15 hours. The incident, which began on July 15 at 16:39 PST, affected critical cloud offerings including Google Cloud VMware Engine, Bare Metal Solution, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, with full resolution achieved by July 16 at 07:34 PST.

According to Google’s incident report, the root cause was a loss of utility power and subsequent cooling capacity. An electrical fault on the utility grid upstream of the data center disrupted electrical distribution gear and cooling equipment, causing ambient temperatures to rise rapidly within affected data halls. To prevent equipment damage from extreme heat, host servers, storage clusters, and network switches were automatically shut down. The outage lasted a total of 14 hours and 55 minutes.

Google operates multiple data centers in the Netherlands, including its latest facility in Winschoten, Groningen, which opened in November 2025, and earlier sites in Eemshaven (opened 2018) and Middenmeer (opened 2020). The company also broke ground on a new data center at the Westpoort industrial estate west of Hoogkerk in April 2024. This incident underscores the vulnerability of cloud infrastructure to utility grid failures, a growing concern as hyperscale data centers increasingly rely on stable power and cooling systems to maintain uptime.

The outage follows a separate incident in June 2026, when Google Cloud experienced issues in its India cloud regions after a fire at a third-party data center operated by STT GDC/Tata. That fire forced an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment, isolating a non-compute local Point of Presence in Delhi and reducing available network capacity in the metro area. Together, these events highlight the cascading risks that power and cooling disruptions pose to global cloud services, emphasizing the need for robust redundancy and backup systems in hyperscale data center operations.