A few years ago, I worked for a hospital system which had their datacenter in Phoenix. We had a large (tens of thousands of square feet) datacenter in supportin

A few years ago, I worked for a hospital system which had their datacenter in Phoenix. We had a large (tens of thousands of square feet) datacenter in supporting a few dozen hospitals and its HVAC system was marginal. On a hot day it could barely keep the datacenter below 80 degrees. This was a facility with hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, I don't think there were any systems which affected patient care, but pretty much every other type of hospital system was in that building. When the AC did fail, the building temperature spiked up over 90 degrees within half an hour and eventually climbed up over 100. We spent most of the afternoon shutting down the least critical systems so the most important ones would stay online. Then slowly bringing them back online after HVAC was back online and the building started to cool again in the evening. I was stunned that they didn't install some kind of redundant HVAC setup after that, or at least one that kept the room at 70 degrees on a hot day. The other huge facilities failure at that facility was when electricians were working on the (ironically enough) backup power system. They accidentally cut power to the entire datacenter for about 30 seconds. I've seen more server down-time due to facilities errors than computer hardware by a good margin.