The ongoing heatwave has been identified as the main cause of the outage recorded at Google and Oracle’s cloud data centers.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n