Websites are down as a result of Google and Oracle cloud servers wilting in the UK heat wave

Due to cooling problems, Google and Oracle’s cloud services and servers in the UK have gone offline as the country undergoes a record-breaking heatwave.

Datacenters couldn’t handle the heat when the temperature in eastern England reached 40.3C (104.5F), the hottest temperature ever recorded by a nation not accustomed to these temperatures. In order to prevent long-term damage, some machines were turned off, making some resources, services, and virtual machines inaccessible and bringing down unfortunate websites and the like.

Its servers in the south of the UK, which supply networking, storage, and compute, as well as other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources, are down. According to a status update from Team Oracle, cooling systems were to blame, and technicians turned off equipment in an effort to stop hardware from overheating.

The UK South (London) Data Center’s cooling infrastructure “has experienced a difficulty as a result of unseasonal temperatures in the region,” Oracle stated on Tuesday at 1638 UTC. As a result, some customers might not be able to use or access resources hosted by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the region.

“The relevant service teams have been engaged and are working to restore the affected infrastructure back to a healthy state however, as a precautionary measure, we are in the process of identifying service infrastructure that can be safely powered down to prevent additional hardware failures. This step is being taken with the intention of limiting the potential for any long term impact to our customers.”

According to reports, Oracle’s cooling system malfunctioned at least in part at noon, UK time.

Not just the IT behemoth Oracle has reported disruptions caused by temperature. One of Google Cloud’s London facilities, europe-west2-a, has systems that are “experiencing elevated error rates, latencies or service unavailability,” according to the company.

BigQuery, SQL, and Kubernetes are just a few of the storage and compute services that are being impacted by these problems. At 1615 UTC, Google acknowledged the outage. One effect of this outage has been the destruction of WordPress websites hosted by WP Engine in the UK and supported by Google Cloud.

A other Google advisory states, “There has been a cooling-related failure in one of our buildings that hosts zone europe-west2-a for region europe-west2.”

“This led to VM terminations and a loss of machines for a small group of our clients because it created a partial breakdown of capacity in that zone. We are making a lot of effort to restore cooling and expand capacity in that zone. Zone Europe-West2-A shouldn’t experience any more effects, and this should also apply to any presently running virtual machines.

“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 seeing regional impact for a small proportion of newly launched Persistent Disk volumes and are working to restore redundancy for the impacted replicated Persistent Disk devices.”

In addition to causing fires, the extreme heat in parts of England has also affected train, power, and road services. A melting runway at Luton Airport has forced the airport to temporarily close. If other internet services are impacted, we’ll let you know.