As record temperatures hit much of the UK, tech giants Google and Oracle suffered outages as cooling systems failed at London data centres.
Data centres are large highly secure buildings that hold banks of computers and are the powerhouses behind many online services.
But the concentrated computing power generates heat so powerful that cooling is essential.
Both companies say the problems have now been resolved.
Oracle, a large American database software and technology business, reported overheating problems.
“Following unseasonably high temperatures in the UK south (London) region, two cooler units in the data centre experienced a failure when they were required to operate above their design limits,” the company wrote on a status page first spotted by The Register.
“As a result, temperatures in the data centre began to climb, which caused some systems to shut down as a protective measure.”
As Britain baked, overheating also hit a Google Cloud data centre location in London.
Google Cloud lets other businesses do work on the company’s computers.
The company reported that “there has been a cooling-related failure in one of our buildings”.
In order to prevent damage to machines and an extended outage, the firm said it powered down some of them.
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