Google, Oracle Cloud Servers Go Under As UK Heatwave Intensifies

As temperatures in the United Kingdom soar past 40°C (104°F) for the first time, with thermometers hitting record temperatures in over 30 locations across the nation, even technology is feeling the heat. 

Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud reported outages as cooling systems went under at the companies’ respective data centers, leading engineers to shut down equipment in order to prevent long-term damages to the hardware. 

Initially spotted by The Register, Oracle was the first to be hit, reporting that “a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Centre experienced an issue,” leading to “non-critical hardware” being powered down. 

A couple hours later, Google Cloud followed suit, publishing an incident report of a “cooling-related failure” in one of the buildings, causing “terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers.” 

For now, as per Bleeping Computer, users of both Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud may not be able to reach or run virtual machines, or could see Persistent Disk devices running in “single redundancy mode.” 

Thankfully, the companies are not anticipating other issues as they currently work to bring the cooling systems back online. 

[via The Register and Bleeping Computer, cover image via Daniel Constante | Dreamstime.com]