July 22, 2022 10:00 GMT

Technology News Team

Google and Oracle Forced to Shut Down Computers Due to UK Heat Wave

Google’s UK-based region, Europe-West2, and Oracle, London report heat wave sparks database cooling system meltdown. 

The main operators, or powerhouse, so to say, behind many online services are banks of computers housed in large, highly secure buildings known as data centres.

However, the heat produced by the concentrated computing power is so intense that cooling is necessary. Therefore, just before 4:00 BST. on Tuesday, both of these information giants reported overheating, from their computers.

Oracle

Oracle stated that two cooling units in the data center "experienced a fault" when asked to work above their design limits following unusually high temperatures in the southern region of the United Kingdom (London).

Evidently, the systems' shutdown served as a preventative measure as a result of the heat wave and the data center's rising temperature. As a result, their customers could not reportedly, access or use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources hosted in the region.

In a Wednesday morning update posted shortly after 10:00 BST, the company claimed the problem had been fixed.

Google Cloud Data Center

Even though the problem at Oracle was resolved, overheating also affected a Google Cloud data center in London. The company announced shortly after 6:00 BST that "one of our buildings has experienced a cooling-related failure." Again, as a protective measure, Google powered down some of these machines. Despite this, however, the company claimed that only a small percentage of customers were affected by this decision, in a release given on Wednesday evening, 7:00 BST.

Google Released Statement

“To prevent damage to machines and a prolonged outage, we have closed off part of the zone and are limiting the GCE Preemptible Launches. We are seeing a regional impact on a small portion of the newly launched Persistent Disk volumes and are working on redundancy for those affected replicated Persistent Disk devices.”

COMPANY: Google & Oracle

https://www.oracle.com

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters