The extreme heat wave currently prevailing in the UK and other parts of Europe is taking a toll on Google and Oracle's cloud servers, especially those located in data centers that are not designed to withstand such high temperatures. Over 34 places in Britain beat the previous record temperature of 38,7°C, measured three years ago, with the highest temperature ever - 40,3°C - recorded in the village of Coninsby in Lincolnshire in the east of the country.
As the website reports The Register, Oracle has been forced to shut down some hardware at a data center in South London, which could cause some customers to be unable to access some Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services. Google, on the other hand, is reporting "increased error rates, latency or service unavailability" across various cloud services in Western Europe.
In both cases, the problem was caused by a failure of the cooling systems struggling to cope with the extreme heat. Oracle said that "work on cooling systems continues and temperatures are decreasing due to repairs and shutdown of non-critical systems". He added that "as temperatures approach operable levels, some services may begin to recover".
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Yesterday, Google also announced a cooling failure affecting the region it refers to as europe-west2. “The high temperatures caused a partial capacity failure, resulting in the termination of virtual instruments and loss of service functionality for a small group of our customers. We are working hard to get the cooling back up and running and build enough capacity. We do not expect any further impacts in the europe-west2 zone, and currently running virtualizations should not be affected by these issues." Google wrote in a service status report. The company uses tens of millions of liters of groundwater for cooling.
Britain and Western Europe have been gripped by extreme heat, which has also caused fires across London and forced the Royal Air Force to halt flights to one of its bases. Large-scale fires were also recorded in Spain, France, Portugal and Greece, where they destroyed entire swathes of vegetation and forced thousands of people from their homes.
