July 20, 2022
The ongoing heatwave has been identified as the main cause of the outage recorded at Google and Oracle’s cloud data centers.
Cooling systems at the two companies’ data centers were shut down on a day when Britain recorded a record-breaking heatwave of around 40.2 degrees Celsius (104.4 Fahrenheit).
The two companies were forced to shut down equipment at their data centers to prevent permanent damage to hardware components that could cause prolonged outages.
Oracle first reported the incident, claiming that a cooling failure at about 11: 30 am EST had caused “non-critical hardware” to be powered down.
“As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Centre experienced an issue. This led to a subset of our service infrastructure needed to be powered down to prevent uncontrolled hardware failures. This step has been taken with the intention of limiting the potential for any long-term impact to our customers,” Oracle said on its status page.
Two hours after Oracle’s report, Google reported cooling outages at one of the company’s buildings, which houses the europe-west2-a zone for region.
Like Oracle, the cooling failure has disrupted Google Cloud customers. Virtual machines were shut down, machine access was not possible, and Persistent Disk devices were running in single redundancy mode.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
