London Data Centres Lose Power During Heatwave

Record-breaking heatwave in London leaves US tech giants' data centres without power.

12:29 21 July 2022

Various data centres across London faced outages due to the record-breaking heatwave. Google Cloud data centre reports "cooling-related failure" as the temperature in some parts of the country reaches more than 40C. Another US software giant, Oracle, also reported a cooling problem that affected its services in the US. 

 

Both firms say that the outages were caused by "unreasonable temperatures" that damaged their cloud and networking equipment leaving systems struggling in the unprecedented heatwave. 

 

Data operators keep the equipment and systems cool using fans, which use lots of energy. Tech firms have been exploring different methods to prevent overheating. Iceotope, a start-up company based in Sheffield, is currently exploring the use of liquid emersion cooling technology to address the problem in the tech sector. Microsoft, on the other hand, is currently trialling the deployment of data centres in containers on the seafloor.