The popular search engine and technology company Google announced that an explosion had occurred in one of its data centers, injuring dozens of employees. The Google data center explosion is believed to have been caused by an accidental fire that started in one of the server cabinets within a facility, which houses hundreds of thousands of servers.

The fire was quickly put out using water, but not before most employees evacuated the facility. Only 12 were hospitalized due to smoke inhalation and second-degree burns on their arms and legs.

"We are aware of an electrical incident on Aug. 8 at Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injuring three on-site people who are now being treated. The health and safety of all workers are our absolute top priority. We work closely with partners and local authorities to investigate the situation and provide assistance as needed." Said a Google spokesperson.

30,000 instances of Google outages have been reported in the United States today by the outage-tracking website Downdetector. According to Downdetector, Google Search, YouTube, and Google Maps were most impacted, but they came back just as quickly as they went down.

A data center can go offline for any number of different reasons. For instance, last month's record-breaking heat wave forced Google and Oracle to take their U.K. data centers offline. As temperatures topped 104 degrees Fahrenheit, both companies cited their data centers' cooling systems as the cause of the outages.

Due to a cooling failure at an Oracle data center in London, Google temporarily powered down certain portions of its cloud services to prevent damage to the hardware and the risk of an extended outage.

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced the company's plans to invest $9.5 billion in data centers and U.S. offices in 2022.

"Our investments in data centers will continue to power the digital tools and services that help people and businesses thrive." Said Google CEO Pichai in April.

The company recently launched a $750 million new data center in Nebraska, with more to come for their locations in Georgia, Nevada, Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia.

As a company, Google's hyper-scale data centers contain thousands of servers, storage, and networking equipment. In addition, Google Cloud has 34 existing cloud regions to accommodate its global user base. As of the second quarter of 2022, Google Cloud's revenue surpassed the $6 billion mark for the first time. The company's annualized run rate now exceeds $25 billion.