Although much of the United States has been worrying about deep freeze in recent months, some businesses around the world have the opposite problem. Just as low temperatures can pose challenges to technology, too much heat is also a possible danger for servers. Even if they attempt to regulate this, businesses can find themselves with an emergency weather change that suddenly stops systems from processing normally.
It can happen to well-known fixtures of the web that depend on being available 24-7. Back in 2010, Wikipedia was temporarily forced offline for 2 hours when its servers became too hot. More recently, a data center in Australia for a local internet provider had to shut down when local temperatures soared over the equivalent of 111 degrees Fahrenheit in Perth. While it claims that most customers were not affected by this, the upset reportedly led many to complain on social media.
In 2013, Microsoft had to cope with hot servers after unexpected overheating forced Outlook and Hotmail off the Web for 16 hours. In a statement quoted by PC World at the time, Microsoft's vice president Arthur de Haan explained that the outage was the result of a botched systems update.
"This is an update that had been done successfully previously, but failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way," he said. "This failure resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the datacenter."
This is a problem that could be caused by a technical fault or a dramatic weather pattern. Either way, businesses have to take initiative to lessen the damage that a data shortage has on them in the long run. Working with a disaster recovery consulting team, your operations will recommence much sooner.