https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/09/04/google-engineer-unplugged-every-fiber-they-could-see-and-surprise-took-down-a-chunk-of-the-g-cloud/5294418

"A procedural error meant that the physical maintenance action sequentially unplugged 100% of fiber paths across all devices within 13 minutes. The nature of the error, combined with the speed of the action, prevented warnings of incorrect action reaching the engineer before complete disconnection.”
Once the engineer disconnected the routers, VMs in one zone of the us-central1-b region lost contact with the outside world. They could at least chat with each other, but users couldn’t contact their VMs to figure out what was going on.
To summarize: A Google Cloud zone went offline because one of the company’s engineers pulled out all the cables that connected it to the internet. Once someone plugged everything in again, it started working. 😂