Massive Fire Destroyed OVH Strasbourg Data Center

Europe’s largest cloud services firm OVHcloud suffered from a massive fire at one of their data centers early Wednesday morning (just before 1 a.m. local time). The Strasbourg data center (SBG2) was destroyed along with part of a second facility (SBG1). 

According to Netcraft, 3.6 million websites across 464,000 distinct domains were taken offline. This affected many websites including online banks, news sites, webmail services, online shops that reportedly sell personal protective equipment (PPE) to safeguard against the coronavirus, and some of the countries’ government websites.  

OVH released this statement:

With our 15 data centers in Europe, our technical and commercial teams are fully invested to support our customers, implement solutions and mitigate the impact of the unavailability of our Strasbourg site. Our mission is to provide our customers with the highest quality of services to support their online activities and we know how important this is to them. We sincerely apologize for the difficulties and challenges caused by this fire. We are committed to continuing [sic] to communicate with the greatest transparency about the cause of the fire and its consequences.

Founder and chairman of OVH Octave Klaba posted an update on Twitter:

Due to a loss in servers, some websites have permanently lost their live data, including the Facepunch Studio game, Rust. The multiplayer survival game is reported to have lost large amounts of game data. 

More importantly, everyone is safe. 

It is highly recommended that all system administrators have a disaster recovery plan. This should include backing up and performing regular tests on your records to ensure they stay safe and available at all times. 

This tragedy has impacted several data centers. President of DNS Made Easy and Constellix Steven Job explains,

“Over 5,000 domains on our DNS Made Easy and Constellix services have changed IPs automatically due to this incident. Even though data facilities have top-of-the-line fire suppression, incidents like this happen. Early in our business, we suffered multiple data center fires that caused us to think seriously about extra redundancy and disaster recovery. This is one reason why we are committed to providing all companies a solution that is not only industry elite, but also affordable.” - Steven Job

This was a highly unfortunate event, and our thoughts go out to everyone at OVH and the first responders. Tiggee is here to support the OVH Strasbourg Data Center and anyone affected during this incident. 

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Image Source: Security Affairs