As temperatures in the UK hit an all-time high on Tuesday, a cooling failure led to a shutdown at a Google data center in London
Google had a breakdown at a data center in London on what has officially become the hottest day on record in the UK.
The record temperatures reached 40.3 degrees Celsius in the UK and sparked multiple fires in London and elsewhere. The heat was so intense that the train tracks gave way and melted roads and runaway airports.
But the record temperature also took its toll on IT infrastructure, after a Google Cloud data center in London reported an outage.
Image credit: Google
Cooling error
Google Cloud confirmed the outage on its status pageand blamed the problem on a “refrigeration relationship failure” in one of its buildings, which reduced a “portion of the capacity for zone europa-west2-a for region europa-west2.”
The Google Cloud outage started shortly after 6pm BST on Tuesday and was resolved around 10pm BST.
Apparently, the impact only affected a small number of customers.
The outage impacted services such as Google Cloud, Persistent Disk, and Autoscaling.
Record temperatures in the UK also caused several Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources to go offline on Tuesday.
The software giant said “two cooler units in the data center failed when they had to operate beyond their design limits.”
Previous failures
Google’s services have been previously affected by data center outages and issues.
In March 2021, a major fire at an SBG2 data center in Strasbourg, France, owned by French cloud service provider OVH, caused widespread access problems for Russians trying to access YouTube, Google and other servers.
In September 2020, thousands of Google Drive users in the United States were unable to access the cloud storage platform for several hours.
Google gave no reason for the outage.
In August 2020, an outage impacted Google services for several hours, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Docs.
In 2015, Google admitted that four consecutive lightning strikes that struck a data center in Belgium were the cause of the four-day cloud outage.
In February 2009, a two-hour Google Mail blackout was attributed to a data center overload.
