UK: Google shutdown key data center to protect against damage from heatwave

UK: The tech giant Google revealed that it had to shut down its key data centre to save it from being damaged by the extreme heat in London’s current heatwave. The temperatures have been shattering records in the United Kingdom. Earlier , the operations at St Thomas’ and Guy’s Hospital were called off as the servers had broken down due to intense heat.

Google has revealed the series of events that took place while being forced to shut down the data centre on the hottest day in London. The failure of zone “Europe-west2-a” led to the closure of the data center last month. It went down owing to failure in maintaining a safe operating temperature due to a simultaneous failure of multiple, redundant cooling systems combined with the “extraordinarily high” outside temperatures.

The users were left troubled as this failure had impacted various Google services, including Google Compute Engine, Persistent Disk (PD), and Google Cloud Storage, causing instance terminations, service degradation, and networking issues.

The engineers at Google had powered down the data center that is the host of the most affected zone, i.e Europe west2-a. The cloud services remained disrupted for a significant time period lasting for 18hours 23 minutes.

Google attributed the mistake to inadvertently modifying traffic routing for internal services to avoid all three zones in the “Europe-west2” region, rather than just the impacted “europe-west2-a” zone.

The routing incident inhibited the users from accessing the information from regional storage devices that included GCS and Big query throught multiple zones.

This is really something that worries the tech giant and the citizens as well. Google has committed to take necessary actions so as to avoid such incidents in the forthcoming times . These included repairing and re-testing its failover automation in an attempt to ensure stronger resilience in its failover protocols during large-scale events such as this one.