OVH Data Center Suffers a Terrible Fire that Affects Multiple Websites

OVH is the largest hosting provider in Europe and the third-largest in the world. The cloud computing company provides virtual private servers, dedicated servers, and other web services.

A major fire has destroyed a data center of web hosting provider OVH in Strasbourg, France, while severely crippling another, taking many services offline.

Fire at OVH Strasbourg

On Wednesday 10 March 2021, a fire broke out in a room at one of the four OVHcloud data centers in Strasbourg (SBG2). Firefighters immediately intervened to protect the entire team and prevent the spread of the fire. The fire was contained by the early hours of the morning and there are no injuries.

The fire mostly destroyed the SBG2 data center and partially damaged the SBG1 data center (4 of the 12 rooms destroyed). The two other OVHcloud data centers in Strasbourg were not affected by the fire; the SBG3 and SBG4 servers are currently switched off but undamaged.

The root cause of the fire has yet to be established and an investigation has been launched as mandated by the authorities.

Three Priorities of OVH

  • Reserve infrastructures at other datacentres for affected customers

The company have a stock of new servers at the Roubaix and Gravelines sites, ready to be delivered to the majority of affected customers.

  • Secure the site

Regained the access, clean it up, and reconnect the electricity and the network for the three affected datacentres.

  • Continue to assess the impact on customers’ servers at the affected datacentres, to find the best solutions.

The Impacted Clients

The list of impacted clients includes cyber threat intelligence company Bad Packets, provider of free chess server Lichess.org, videogame maker Rust, cryptocurrency exchange Deribit’s blog and docs sites, telecom company AFR-IX, encryption utility VeraCrypt, news outlet eeNews Europe, the art building complex Centre Pompidou, and many others.

Deribit has clarified that the outage only impacted their docs and blog sites and that the exchange was never down.

For videogame maker Rust, the incident has led to a total data loss leaving no way for recovery.

Actions taken by OVHcloud

The technical and commercial teams have been working since to inform the customers and handle the unavailability of the Strasbourg site.

The company’s founder, Octave Klaba, has been on-site with the industrial and technical teams.

 “We are currently facing a major incident in our DataCenter of Strasbourg with a fire declared in the building SBG2. Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2. The whole site has been isolated, which impacts all our services on SBG1, SBG2, SBG3 and SBG4. If your production is in Strasbourg, we recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan. All our teams are fully mobilized along with the firefighters. We will keep you updated as more information becomes available.”, reads the statement provided by OVH.

Customers should immediately bring into effect their disaster recovery plans as OVH is working on restoring its services.

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Guru Baran

Gurubaran is a co-founder of Cyber Security News and GBHackers On Security. He has 10+ years of experience as a Security Consultant, Editor, and Analyst in cybersecurity, technology, and communications.

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