Fire breaks out of OVH France data centre, disrupting services to websites around the world

March 11, 2021
OVH france data centre fire incident disaster recovery websites unavailable

A major unexpected incident happened in Strasbourg, France, where the data centres of OVH, a web hosting and cloud computing company.

OVH is considered the third-largest hosting service provider globally and the largest in Europe. They also provide VPS, dedicated server hosting and various web services.

Consumers and clients of OVH are being advised to conduct their disaster recovery plan after a fire broke out from their France site, rendering multiple data centres unable for service, which impacted many hosted websites around the world.

The whole data centre site has been isolated. Firefighters could not control the fire that started in the SBG2 building, impacting all other services on SBG1, SBG3 and SBG4 building. After a few hours of the incident, SBG2 and SBG3 began to disappear from OVH’s datacenter status dashboard view.

 

This incident resulted in knocking off major websites worldwide, and significant clients of OVH have stated their web services are not accessible.

 

Some of the impacted clients of OVH are Bad Packets, a cyber threat intelligence company, Lichess.org, a free chess server provider, WP Rocket, a frontend website caching plugin for WordPress, Imagify, an image compression tool, Deribit, a cryptocurrency exchange organization, VeraCrypt, an encryption utility provider, eeNews Europe, an electronic engineering news outlet among many others.

Rust, a multiplayer video game with 25 EU servers hosted on the data centre site, expects colossal data loss due to the disaster. They had just announced and confirmed that all the data will not be restored and exploring option on replacing the servers.

OVH’s chairman and founder Octave Klaba has been actively updating customers and clients on Twitter on the status of the incident and provided a plan on the rebuild of the affected rooms, network, servers and storage – this includes the timeline for the recovery of the hosted data and services:

 

OVH france data centre engulfed in flames image 1

 

 

This story is still developing.

 

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