<div><br></div><div><span style="font-size: 1rem;">As record temperatures hit much of the UK on Tuesday, tech giants Google and Oracle suffered outages as cooling systems failed at London data centres.</span><br></div><div><br></div><div>Data centres are large highly secure buildings that hold banks of computers and are the powerhouses behind many online services.</div><div><br></div><div>But the concentrated computing power generates heat so powerful that cooling is essential.</div><div><br></div><div>Both companies say the problems have now been resolved.</div><div><br></div><div>Oracle, a large American database software and technology business, reported overheating problems just before 16:00 BST.</div><div><br></div><div>"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.</div><div><br></div><div>"As a result, temperatures in the data centre began to climb, which caused some systems to shut down as a protective measure."</div><div><br></div><div>The company said the issue was resolved, in an update posted shortly after 10:00 BST on Wednesday.</div><div><br></div><div>As Britain baked, overheating also hit a Google Cloud data centre location in London.</div><div><br></div><div>Google Cloud lets other businesses do work on the company's computers.</div><div><br></div><div>Just after 18:00 BST, the company reported that "there has been a cooling-related failure in one of our buildings".</div><div><br></div><div>In order to prevent damage to machines and an extended outage, the firm said it powered down some of them.</div><div><br></div><div>The problem was fixed by 07:00 BST on Wednesday and the company said that only a "small set of our customers" were affected.</div><div><br></div><div>Because the data processed can be highly valuable to their customers, data centres are built with many back-ups, including plenty of cooling capacity.</div><div><br></div><div>Experts the BBC spoke to on Monday doubted that modern data centres would experience difficulties, so the failures at big, well-resourced, companies like Google will have come as a surprise.</div><div><br></div><div>But operators were wary of the unprecedented temperatures.</div><div><br></div><div>Paul Hone, of Redcentric, which operates data centres in Harrogate, London, Reading and Cambridge, told the BBC that the firm had put its disaster recovery plan into action on Monday.</div><div><br></div><div>Mr Hone added that while data centres are designed to withstand hot weather, the heatwave's temperatures would be at the "upper end of design expectations for a lot of data centre operators".</div><div><br></div><div>In the end, for Mr Hone, Tuesday passed without incident.</div><div><br></div><div>But additional cooling means additional electricity consumption, which in turn can mean increased carbon emissions.</div><div><br></div><div>With climate scientists warning that very hot days will become more frequent, tech firms are exploring greener cooling solutions and computer systems that consume less power and generate less heat.</div><div><br></div><div>Microsoft carried out an experiment with an underwater data centre off Orkney in 2020. Part of the attraction was the natural cooling provided by the surrounding seawater.</div><div><br></div><div>bnbd24/fas</div>