Embarrassing Meltdown at Google and Oracle Cloud

As the mercury hit a shade over 40 Degrees Centigrade on Monday and Tuesday in London it put a lot of pressure on IT Teams across the country to keep hardware cool.
Parts of a computer systems are in themselves hot and have substantial cooling systems built into the hardware to dissipate heat. Hard drives however have no dedicated cooling and are rarely rated to run at more than 50 degrees centigrade. Imagining a spinning platter in a mechanical drive looking a bit like a high tech LP spinning on a record deck, hopefully gives you a feeling for how excessive heat could cause a failure.
Cloud operators make a big play that when you move to the cloud this infrastructure together with the power overhead is handled by them in state of the art facilities. However, a “Cooling related Failure” and in the densely packed environment that is a server center this caused significant disk loss affecting both Google and Oracle data.
Oracle issued a press release to say that they were back up and running on Wednesday, with all systems restored. Google however was still fighting persistent issues affecting systems performance. At this time it is not clear if any permanent loss of data has occurred.

It’s a blow to the reputation of both platforms.