OVHcloud has suffered a disastrous fire that has engulfed some of the firm’s data centers.
On March 10, OVHcloud founder and chairman Octave Klaba started a Twitter thread updating customers on the situation, which has claimed at least one data center.
OVHcloud is a global cloud, dedicated server, and managed bare metal services provider catering to over 1.5 million customers.
The company manages 27 data centers in countries including the US, UK, France, and Australia.
As data centers manage vast quantities of data for customers, providers have to be stringent when it comes to security. OVHcloud restricts physical access to employees only and security personnel are always on-site — but this has not stopped a fire from breaking out.
“We have a major incident on SBG2,” Klaba said. “The fire declared in the building. Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2. The whole site has been isolated which impacts all services in SGB1-4.”
The impacted data centers, located in Strasbourg, France, includes SBG2, which has been completely destroyed. Part of SBG1 has been destroyed, too, but firefighters were able to protect SBG3. SBG4 has not been impacted by the fire. Klaba says that “everyone is safe.”
Images shared on social media appear to show the extent of the fire.
“Firefighters continue to cool the buildings with the water,” the executive said. “We don’t have the access to the site. That is why SBG1, SBG3, SBG4 won’t be restarted today.”
The fire has now been quelled but an assessment of the overall damage caused to OVHcloud’s data centers may take some time. Impacted clients have been urged to turn to backups to minimize downtime and disruption.
“We recommend [you] activate your Disaster Recovery Plan,” Klaba added.
At the time of writing, Klaba is on-site. In an update, the executive said:
“We finished to shutdown the UPS in SBG3. Now they are off. We are looking to enter into SBG3 and check the servers. The goal is to create a plan to restart , at least SBG3/SBG4, maybe SBG1. To do so, we need to check the network rooms too.”
Update 10.19 am GMT: According to Klaba, “all servers in SBG3” are okay, while still non-operational, and the company is working on a way to restart them. Work on verifying SBG1 is now underway.
ZDNet has reached out to OVHcloud and will update when we hear back.
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