Proton’s Frankfurt Outage Report: 20 Minutes to Critical, and Hardware Too Scarce to Sacrifice

When the cooling died in Proton’s Frankfurt data center, the on-call engineers made a call that almost never has to be made: prioritize saving the hardware, even if that might extend the outage. The company’s incident report, published a day after the August 27 outage by CTO Bart Butler, lays out why. Room temperature climbed from a nominal 21.8 to 51.9 degrees Celsius in under half an hour…