Google Fiber Splice Box Fire Damage For Google Datacenter – 100Tbps Capacity

Urs Hölzle, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, shared a photo on Twitter on Friday of a Google fiber splice box that caught on fire in a rural area of South Carolina. That caused a Google datacenter to lose 100Tbps of capacity but Google was able to restore it within 12 hours.

He shared this photo and more details on Twitter, I brightened up the photo a lot:

What you see is a “splice box” where the fiber briefly come to the surface, for example, to connect to a different fiber route. Often these are underground, too, but not here.

— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) December 17, 2021

Before it was destroyed, the link carried 100 Tbps (100 million megabits/sec) of capacity for Google. So we did notice 🙂 But because we have redundant links there was no customer visible impact.

— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) December 17, 2021

So while we’re all looking forward to a quiet holiday period, please thank these unsung heroes of internet infrastructure. They never get a quiet time because there are disruptions every day along the millions of miles of fiber they are responsible for. Hats off to them! 👏👏👏

— Urs Hölzle (@uhoelzle) December 17, 2021

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.

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