Record temperatures in the UK have disrupted Google and Oracle data centers this week, affecting consumers in the region. The heat wave that is sweeping through Europe is the result of a global climate crisis caused by greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from deforestation, oil burning and industry.

Google disables virtual machines

At Google, high temperatures have caused virtual machines (VMs) to shut down prematurely for some Google Compute Engine (GCE) service customers in the europe-west-2a zone. The problem arose on Tuesday (19) – the day the UK recorded the highest temperature in its history, 40ºC – at 10:13 and persisted until 20:45, resulting in a service interruption of more than ten hours.

To prevent damage to machines, the company turned off some of the systems in the affected area and limited the launch of new GCE instances. The temperature in the region remained high and at night – 25.9 ºC.

Oracle’s cooling units were affected

In Oracle’s case, a heat wave affected two cooling units at a London data center when they had to operate beyond the limits they were designed for. Because of this, the temperature inside the data center began to rise, according to the company, leading to the shutdown of part of the computing structure as a form of protection. The outage occurred at 13:00 on Tuesday (19) and service was not restored until 11:00 the next day.

climate crisis

For Brazilians, temperatures around 40ºC may not sound like much, but in England, the unprecedented heat is starting to take a toll on the country’s infrastructure. Operations at two airports were halted when parts of the runway melted in the hot sun. The heavy rains that hit Europe last July are also a result of climate change.

In 2021, large-scale wildfires occurred in North America. Such occurrences have increased fivefold in the last five decades and tend to become more severe, including in Brazil. More than 11,000 natural disasters have been recorded since the 1970s, resulting in about two million deaths, according to a United Nations report.

Twitter to ban climate change denial ads
The company has taken action to help environmental restoration efforts

Source: Oracle

…..