Google Data Centre In London Outage Blamed On Cooling Failure

Google suffered an outage at a data centre in London, on what has officially become the hottest day ever in the United Kingdom.

The record temperatures reached as high at 40.3 Celsius in the UK, and triggered multiple fires across London and elsewhere. The heat was so severe that train tracks buckled, and roads and airport runaways melted.

But the record temperature also took its toll on IT infrastructure, after a Google Cloud data centre in London reported an outage.

Cooling failure

Google Cloud confirmed the outage on its status page, and blamed the issue on a “cooling relation failure” in one of its buildings that a “portion of capacity for zone europe-west2-a for region europe-west2.”

The Google Cloud outage began shortly after 6pm BST on Tuesday, and was resolved around 10pm BST.

Apparently the impact only impacted a small number of customers.

The outage impacted services such as Google Cloud, Persistent Disk, and Autoscaling.

The record temperatures in the UK also knocked multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources offline on Tuesday.

The software giant said “two cooler units in the data centre experienced a failure when they were required to operate above their design limits.”

Previous outages

Google’s services have been impacted by outages and data centres problems previously.

In March 2021 a fire a major fire in a SBG2 data centre located in Strasbourg (France) owned by French cloud service provider OVH, caused widespread access problems for Russians trying to access YouTube, Google and other servers.

In September 2020 thousands of Google Drive users across the United States were unable to access the cloud storage platform for a number of hours.

Google did not supply a reason for that outage.

In August 2020, an outage impacted Google services including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Docs for a number of hours.

In 2015 Google admitted that four successive lightning strikes that affected a data centre in Belgium were the cause of the four-day cloud outage.

In February 2009 a two hour blackout of Google Mail was blamed on a data centre overload.