Google Data Centres Melt In Extreme European Heat

You may have noticed, it’s been a bit hot over the past couple of days. I’m sure it’s no news to anyone that Europe has been experiencing an intense heatwave. I can safely say that I’ve never felt warmer than I did yesterday seeing as the UK recorded its hottest ever temperature.

Parts of the UK reached a very, very toasty 40.3 degrees Celsius. Elsewhere in Europe, temperatures far exceeded 40 degrees with Portugal peaking at a whopping 47 degrees Celsius. The heatwave has caused devastating effects to life, the environment and infrastructure. Google’s data centres are just one victim of the intense heat.

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Google reported disruptions to services after discovering that their data centres weren’t built to withstand such sweltering temperatures. As reported by The Register, Google noted “elevated error rates, latencies, [and] service unavailability” in Europe. The issue was due to the ineffectiveness of the system’s cooling operations. The tech’s cooling mechanisms were quite simply not powerful enough to stop the hardware from overheating, putting it at a risk of melting.

Google wrote that a cooling error had “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.” They went on to add, “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 working to restore redundancy for any remaining impacted replicated Persistent Disk devices.”

In the US, Google collects millions of gallons of groundwater a day in order to cool down their servers but the system was never implemented in the UK due to the country’s lower temperatures. With heatwaves like this likely to become more common, we could see more preventive measures taken in the UK.