Servers of Google Cloud and Oracle located in the UK struggled with cooling-related outages Tuesday as the country experienced record-breaking heat that reached as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). Both companies blame temperature for the unexpected shutdowns. The Verge reported, “The UK recorded temperatures rising above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time in its 350 years of climate records. The searing heatwave is unprecedented in a country that’s used to much cooler summer weather and is a bellwether of more extremes to come.”
Google Cloud status page said, “There was a cooling related failure in one of our buildings that hosts a portion of capacity for zone europe-west2-a for region europe-west2 that is now resolved. GCE, Persistent Disk and Autoscaling impacts have been addressed. Customers can launch VMs in all zones of europe-west2. A small number of HDD backed Persistent Disk volumes are still experiencing impact and will exhibit IO errors. If you are continuing to experience issues with these services, please contact Google Cloud Product Support and reference this message.
The issue has been resolved for all affected users as of Tuesday, 2022-07-19 20:43 US/Pacific.
We thank you for your patience while we worked on resolving the issue.”
The Register reported, “When the mercury hit 40.3C (104.5F) in eastern England, the highest ever registered by a country not used to these conditions, data centers couldn’t take the heat. Selected machines were powered off to avoid long-term damage, causing some resources, services, and virtual machines to become unavailable, taking down unlucky websites and the like.
Multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources are offline, including networking, storage, and compute provided by its servers in the south of UK. Cooling systems were blamed, and techies switched off equipment in a bid to prevent hardware burning out, according to a status update from Team Oracle.”
