As temperatures reached record highs over most of the UK on Tuesday, digital behemoths Google and Oracle experienced downtime as cooling systems failed at their London data centers.
Data centers are massive, secure structures that house banks of computers and serve as the powerhouses for many online businesses.
However, the concentrated computer power generates so much heat that cooling is required.
Both companies claim that the issues have been rectified.
Just before 16:00 BST, Oracle, a prominent American database software and technology company, reported overheating issues.
“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 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.
Just after 18:00 BST, 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.
The problem was fixed by 07:00 BST on Wednesday an
