Our digital world’s infrastructure is not able to adapt to climate changes. This was evident in the UK where Google, and Oracle were forced to close due to the heat wave. Yesterday’s temperatures in the East of England topped 40 degrees.
This is a remarkable value for British Isles which have a mild Atlantic climate. This is the worst thing anyone who has ever had to deal with cooling strategies for data centers could have hoped for. According to The Register, both Google and Oracle had no choice but to shut down certain parts of their server infrastructure. Instead of risking overheating their data centers, operators decided to close down services and deny customers access to virtual machines.
Instigated by failures
It was evident, however, that the systems wouldn’t be able to withstand heat waves. Yesterday afternoon, Oracle announced that part of the cooling infrastructure at UK South (London’s) data center was down due to unusual temperatures. Some customers might not be able access the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources located in the region.
Google also reported something similar. The company stated that there was a cooling problem in one of its buildings, which houses the Europe-west2-a region zone. We have temporarily closed off a portion of the zone to prevent any damage or prolonged outages and we are restricting the GCE Preemptible launches. We are experiencing a regional impact on some Persistent Disk volumes that were recently launched. We are currently working to redundancy for the affected duplicated Persistent Disk units.
