Tech giants Google and Oracle suffered outages as cooling systems in London’s data centres failed as record temperatures hit much of Britain on Tuesday. Data centres are large, highly secure buildings that edge computers and are the powerhouses behind many online services.
But concentrated computing power generates heat so powerful that cooling is necessary. Both companies say that the problems have now been resolved. Oracle, a leading US database software and technology business, reported an overheating problem just before 16:00 BST.
“Following unseasonably high temperatures in the UK south (London) region, two cooler units in the data centre experienced a failure when they were required to operate above their design limits,” the company wrote on a status page first spotted by The Register.
“As a result, temperatures in the data centre began to climb, which caused some systems to shut down as a protective measure.”
The company said the issue had been resolved in an update posted shortly after 10:00 BST on Wednesday. As Britain baked in, overheating also affected a Google Cloud data centre in London.
The firm said it shut down some of them to prevent damage to the machines and an extended outage.
The issue was fixed by 07:00 BST on Wednesday, and the company said only “a small group of our customers” were affected.
RedCentric’s Paul Hohn, which operates data centres in Harrogate, London, Reading and Cambridge, told the BBC the firm had put its disaster recovery plan into action on Monday.
Mr Hone said that while data centres are designed to withstand hot weather, heatwave temperatures will be “at the upper end of design expectations for many data centre operators”.
In the end, for Mr Han, Tuesday passed without incident. But additional cooling means additional power consumption, which can increase carbon emissions.
With climate scientists warning that scorching days will become more frequent, tech firms are exploring greener cooling solutions and computer systems that consume less electricity and generate less heat.
Microsoft experimented with an underwater data centre near Orkney in 2020. Part of the attraction was the natural cooling provided by the surrounding seawater.
