The heat in Great Britain has partly caused the data centres of Oracle and Google to collapse. The Google Cloud status page stated for British customers that there were problems due to a ‘cooling-related failure’ in one data centre.
As a result, virtual machines were shut down, and several physical devices were disabled.
Also, at Oracle, British users could read that there were problems due to ‘unseasonal temperatures’ in which devices were shut down for a small part of the customers, and machines were shut down as a precaution to limit the damage. In the meantime, the problems seem to have been fixed, according to The Register, The Verge, and Bleeping Computer.
In parts of Britain, specifically the east of England, temperatures soared to just above 40 degrees yesterday, which is highly unusual for the region even in summer. So, in addition to forest fires and melting asphalt, the heat may also affect some parts of the internet. In other words: the cloud is also affected by the sun.
Data centres like Google or Oracle rely heavily on cooling for their operation. Although just like ordinary computers, the smooth operation of servers in such buildings is subject to the temperature in which they operate, the machines themselves emit a lot of heat, which means that a data centre must continuously supply cool air and remove warm air in so-called hot and cold corridors.
But the cooling also determines the price tag of a data centre. For example, those who operate a data centre in a generally cold and rainy region such as the UK usually have lower (electricity) costs for cooling than, say, in the south of Spain, because part of the cooling is arranged thanks to the outside air. But on days when those southern temperatures shift to the north, not all data centres can cope with that fluctuation.
