UK Heatwave Takes Out Google and Oracle Cloud Servers

The UK is experiencing record heat, and it's taking a toll on cloud servers and the websites they power....
UK Heatwave Takes Out Google and Oracle Cloud Servers
Written by Matt Milano
  • The UK is experiencing record heat, and it’s taking a toll on cloud servers and the websites they power.

    According to The Register, the UK is experiencing a heat wave that has topped 104.5F. The country doesn’t usually see that kind of heat and is ill-equipped to deal with it. Google and Oracle’s data centers are taking a hit, with some machines being powered down to avoid permanent damage.

    “There has been a cooling related failure in one of our buildings that hosts zone europe-west2-a for region europe-west2,” Google wrote in an advisory. “This caused a partial failure of capacity in that zone, leading to VM terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers. We’re working hard to get the cooling back on-line and create capacity in that zone. We do not anticipate further impact in zone europe-west2-a and currently running VMs should not be impacted. A small percentage of replicated Persistent Disk devices are running in single redundant mode.

    “In order to prevent damage to machines and an extended outage, we have powered down part of the zone and are limiting GCE preemptible launches. We are working to restore redundancy for any remaining impacted replicated Persistent Disk devices.”

    Similarly, Oracle issued a statement of its own, blaming “unseasonal temperatures.”

    “As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South (London) Data Centre has experienced an issue,” the company wrote. “The relevant service teams have been engaged and are working to restore the affected infrastructure back to a healthy state. Our engineers expect redundancy to the impacted cooling infrastructure to be restored within the next 1-2 hours, after which services will begin to be recovered.”

    Oracle later updated its statement to reflect an improvement in the situation.

    “We’re continuing repair work on cooling systems in the UK South (London) datacenter to further reduce operating temperatures and mitigate service impact. Datacenter temperatures have reached workable levels and service team engineers are now able to begin working to restore the impacted services. Impacted services are monitoring the recovery process as affected service infrastructure is restored to an operational state.”

    Given the effects of climate change, cloud providers will need to start planning for “unseasonal temperatures” and freak weather events if they plan to remain operational.

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