England: Heat brings Oracle and Google data centers to their knees

Not only in Germany have temperatures reached new peaks in recent days, England was also affected by the heat wave. It even got so hot that the cloud data centers of Oracle and Google had to be shut down temporarily.

Heat in England overwhelms Oracle and Google

In the past few days, the hot desert air also caused record temperatures in England, which is normally rather rainy, and these were not only felt at the Women’s European Football Championship. At the beginning of the week, the English weather service had issued a red weather warning of extreme heat; temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius were measured on Tuesday.

It goes without saying that such temperatures do not leave technical equipment unscathed. Affected were, for example, the cloud data centers of the providers Oracle and Google, which were simply overwhelmed with such heat.

As Oracle reports, the cloud infrastructure in the UK South data center in London experienced overheating problems on July 19, and the technology was shut down without further ado. About a day later, after 20 hours, the data server cooling infrastructure was restored and “temperatures have returned to normal levels,” the cloud provider wrote.

Google fixed the problems faster

The situation was quite similar in Google Cloud’s cloud data centers, where the heat also paralyzed almost all systems, including the virtual VM machines running on them, in the europe-west2-a host zone area on July 19.

Here, the shutdown due to overheating could even be remedied more quickly. Within about 10 hours, the “cooling-related outages in one of our buildings” were fixed again, writes Google in the corresponding message.

In view of climate change and the simultaneous increased use of cloud infrastructures, providers will thus also have to give higher priority to the cooling of their systems in the future in order to put a stop to the generally rising temperatures.

Even before the heat wave hit Europe this week, Iran felt the full effects of global warming. As a result, the Ministry of Energy in late June summarily banned cryptomining, which is popular in the country, to avoid unnecessarily driving up electricity consumption.