Google also reported a cooling failure earlier today impacting its europe-west2 region. "This caused a partial failure of capacity in that zone, leading to VM terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers," a Service Health(opens in new tab) message states. "We’re working hard to get the cooling back on-line and create capacity in that zone. We do not anticipate further impact in zone europe-west2-a and currently running VMs should not be impacted. A small percentage of replicated Persistent Disk devices are running in single redundant mode.

"In order to prevent damage to machines and an extended outage, we have powered down part of the zone and are limiting GCE preemptible launches. We are working to restore redundancy for any remaining impacted replicated Persistent Disk devices."

While Google and Oracle struggle to get their systems fully online, a Bloomberg(opens in new tab)report says that some data centers in the UK are taking a more basic approach to cooling by spraying their roof-mounted AC units with water, which lowers the ambient temperature around the coils and enables the units to continue to function efficiently. It's a short-term solution—Sophia Flucker, director at consulting firm Operational Intelligence, said using untreated hard water could lead to a scale buildup on the equipment and possibly shorten its life—but since there are clearly no long-term solutions to any of this on the horizon, blasting untreated water all over sensitive, expensive AC systems is what we have left. 

Google actually has a deal in place that grants it access to millions of gallons of groundwater(opens in new tab) per day for cooling purposes, which doesn't seem ecologically ideal either, but that's only in the US—this sort of extreme heat presumably wasn't expected to ever happen in the traditionally much-cooler UK.

The UK and much of Western Europe are struggling with a punishing heatwave(opens in new tab)that has also caused a surge of fires(opens in new tab) across London and forced the Royal Air Force to halt flights(opens in new tab) in and out of one of its bases. Large fires burning across Spain, France, Portugal, and Greece have also destroyed swaths of vegetation and forced thousands of people out of their homes.