This article is published in partnership with Time.com. The original version can be found here.
By Alissa Greenberg @alissaleewrites
Despite the popular saying, lightning does strike twice, or even four times — as it did at a Google data center in Belgium last Thursday, causing problems for the next several days and leading to permanent data loss for a small percentage of unlucky users.
The problem began when the facility lost power briefly during one of the late-summer thunderstorms common in the area. That caused problems with reading or writing data for about five percent of disks in the data center. Most were fixed but data on.000001% of the center’s total disk space was lost. “In these cases, full recovery is not possible,” the company said in a statement.
Google accepts full responsibility for the incident and says it is making upgrades to prevent something like this from happening again.
