Google Denies Service Downtime Caused By Data Centre Fire In France; Russian Authorities Disagree

Google and Russia have provided conflicting reasons to why Google and YouTube services were briefly disrupted in the country, the BBC reported. The Russian government blamed a fire at cloud provider OVH data centres in Strasbourg, France. But Google disputes this.

Instead, the tech giant attributed the downtime to a router misconfiguration at a local third-party internet service provider.

“Following extensive investigation we have no evidence to indicate that the fire in OVHCloud’s data centre, or Google’s own infrastructure, was the root cause of this incident,” Google said, according to the BBC.

In contrast, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulating authority, pointed fingers at the fire and said the service disruptions were “not connected to the agency’s actions on restriction of speed of access to the Twitter social platform”.

Roskomnadzor had recently slowed down the speed of Twitter in the country, claiming the platform failed to remove 3,000 posts related to suicide, drugs, and pornography. The authority said the move was aimed at protecting Russian citizens.

Incredibly popular in Russia, Twitter is frequently used by government opponents like Alexei Navalny, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

OVH, which operates the affected data centre, boasts 1.6 million customers across 140 countries. But Google services in Russia are not believed to be routed through OVH, the BBC said.

The fire does have one confirmed victim – the multiplayer video game Rust. The game’s developers tweeted that some player progression data was gone for good.