A “cooling related” failure caused an outage at a Google Cloud data centre in London yesterday, as the UK simmered in record breaking temperatures of more than 40°C.

An update posted on Google’s status page said the interruption to its services began at 6:13pm BST, but that only a “small number of customers” were affected.

The page reported: “Multiple Cloud products experiencing elevated error rates, latencies or service unavailability in europe-west2.”

The cooling issue was detected later in the evening, after 10pm BST, with the status report reading: “A cooling related failure in one of our buildings that hosts zone europe-west2-a for region europe-west2 is impacting multiple Cloud services.

“Our engineering team is currently working to restore the cooling system in europe-west2-a.”

According to the latest update, “GCP product teams are working on restoring their services. ETA to be determined.”