The two major cloud services providers, Google and Oracle, reported cooling-related failures as the UK experienced record-breaking heat that reached as high as 40 degrees Celsius. According to Google Cloud; “We have experienced a cooling-related failure that has caused a partial failure of capacity in that zone, leading to VM [virtual machine] terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers.”
Affected Companies Shut Down its Machines to Prevent Cooling-Related Failures
Oracle said that the unseasonal temperatures in the UK have caused the outage and in order to prevent the cooling-related failures the company has shut down some of its machines. Due to the outage, the customers were unable to access or use the cloud services hosted in the region, including object storage, compute, and block volumes.
According to the Met Office, at least 34 parts of the country broke the UK’s previous national record of 38.7 degrees Celsius. Experts blame climate change for the latest heatwave and said that the more frequent extreme weather will only worsen in years to come.
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[Update] Systems Restored
Google and Oracle have resolved the cooling issues that took place in their data centers due to UK’s intense heat wave. Google shared the following status update; “There was a cooling-related failure in one of our buildings that hosts a portion of capacity for zone Europe-west2-a for region Europe-west2 that is now resolved. GCE, Persistent Disk and Autoscaling impacts have been addressed. Customers can launch VMs in all zones of Europe-west2. A small number of HDD-backed Persistent Disk volumes are still experiencing impact and will exhibit IO errors. If you are continuing to experience issues with these services, please contact Google Cloud Product Support and reference this message.”
Another status update from Oracle reads; “We have confirmed data center cooling infrastructure has been restored and temperatures have returned to normal operating levels. At this time all services and their associated resources have been restored and customers should now see recovery.”
