40C Heatwave lead to Google Cloud Outage in UK

Britain recorded its hottest day ever on Tuesday, with the temperature exceeding 40C (104F) as a heatwave gripping Europe intensified, forcing train tracks to buckle and fueling a spate of fires across London.

This not only impact humans but also the technological infrastructure such as data centers:

A “cooling related” failure in one of the main buildings of Google Cloud data center failed. The incident began at 2022-07-19 06:33 and ended at 2022-07-20 21:20 (all times are US/Pacific). This physical failure lead to service impacted running in the given data center such as:

• Google Cloud Storage: Some customers with data replicated only in the impacted region experienced HTTP 500 errors. Customers with data replicated outside of the impacted region were not affected.
• Google Compute Engine: Customers impacted by this issue would have experienced abnormal instance terminations for instances which were running in the impacted building. Affected customers who experienced an instance failure in europe-west2-a were advised to launch new instances in other zones of europe-west2.
• Cloud SQL: Customers experienced operation failures for backups, creates, Database Migration Service operations, updates, deletes, restarts and exports. Cloud SQL experienced instance unavailability for several zonal instances in europe-west2. A number of HA instances also experienced failover issues in europe-west2.

Also many more services were down, see Google status history.

This example shows clearly that there is a need to better understand the interdependencies between extreme weather evens such as heatwaves, tropical cyclones and others will impact technological and critical infrastructure.