Security News > 2022 > July > UK heat wave causes Google and Oracle cloud outages

An ongoing heatwave in the United Kingdom has led to Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud outages after cooling systems failed at the companies' data centers.

Today, with temperatures reaching a record-breaking 40.2 degrees Celsius, cooling systems at data centers used by Google and Oracle to host their cloud infrastructure have begun to fail.

To prevent permanent damage to hardware components and thus create a prolonged outage, both Google and Oracle have shut down equipment, leading to outages in their cloud services.

"As a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region, a subset of cooling infrastructure within the UK South Data Centre experienced an issue. This led to a subset of our service infrastructure needed to be powered down to prevent uncontrolled hardware failures," reads an Oracle Cloud status message that appears to have been first spotted by TheRegister.

Even with only non-critical hardware powered off, Oracle states that customers in this zone may be unable to access their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources.

"There has been a cooling related failure in one of our buildings that hosts zone europe-west2-a for region europe-west2. 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," reads the Google Cloud incident report.

News URL

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/uk-heat-wave-causes-google-and-oracle-cloud-outages/