Google Cloud and Oracle London cooling outages (July 2022)

The London cooling outages of July 2022 are the hardware shutdowns Google Cloud and Oracle carried out on the day the United Kingdom first passed 40 °C, because they could no longer cool their data halls. On July 19, 2022, the Met Office recorded 40.3 °C at Coningsby, a national record, and around 40 °C in west London. During the day, Oracle reported a cooling issue at its London South data center and powered down part of its infrastructure to avoid hardware damage. Google Cloud then reported a cooling-related failure in one zone of its europe-west2 region, took some capacity offline and degraded services across the region for several hours. Both operators made the same call: shut down before the servers ran hot enough to be damaged. That call moves the loss. There is little or no physical damage, so nothing that triggers standard business interruption at the operator; at the customers, the event falls under non-damage contingent business interruption, or under system failure cover where the policy extends it to service providers. Extreme heat hits a whole metropolitan area at once, which is what interests the accumulation modeler: Google and Oracle went down on the same day for the same reason, in separate facilities. Chillers sized for an outdoor design temperature below that day's 40 °C ended up beyond their curve. Design temperature, long overlooked in risk surveys across northern Europe, is now one of the questions asked.