Fire Has Destroyed OVHcloud Strasbourg Data Centre (SBG2)
A fire early today has destroyed one of OVHcloud’s Strasbourg data centres and part of a second one, the French cloud provider’s CEO, Octave Klaba, wrote in a tweet. He confirmed that all the people working at the site were safe.
We have a major incident on SBG2. 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. We recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan.
— Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 10, 2021
Firefighters were quick on the scene, protecting another OVHcloud facility on the campus from catching fire, while a fourth one experienced no impact.
The Tweet below shows the extent of the fire.
A translation of the below Tweet says – No, the data contained in SBG2’s servers is unlikely to be recoverable. But if you use the Backup FTP #OVH , your backups are in another data center. (The photos are of firefighters)
Non, les données contenues dans les serveurs de SBG2 ne seront vraisemblablement pas récupérables.
— Xavier Garreau (@xgarreau) March 10, 2021
Mais si vous utilisez le Backup FTP #OVH, vos sauvegardes sont dans un autre datacenter. (Les photos sont des pompiers) https://t.co/tRonks8qIw pic.twitter.com/EL5BcMjbc7
OVH have issued the following statement :-
At 00:47 on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, a fire broke out in a room in one of our 4 datacenters in Strasbourg, SBG2. Please note that the site is not classified as a Seveso site. Firefighters immediately intervened to protect our teams and prevent the spread of the fire.
At 2:54 am they isolated the site and closed off its perimeter. By 4:09 am, the fire had destroyed SBG2 and continued to present risks to the nearby datacenters until the fire brigade brought the fire under control. From 5:30 am, the site has been unavailable to our teams for obvious security reasons, under the direction of the prefecture. The fire is now contained. We are relieved that no one was injured, neither among our teams nor among the firefighters and the services of the prefecture, whom we thank for their exemplary mobilization at our side.
With our 15 datacenters 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 continue to communicate with the greatest transparency about the cause of the fire and its consequences.
We are currently assessing the impact of this incident and will communicate as transparently as possible on the progress of our analyses and the implementation of solutions. All of our communication channels, starting with our incident tracking platform (travaux.ovh.com), are accessible so that you can stay informed of developments in real-time.
Founded by Klaba in 1999, OVHcloud is the biggest European-based cloud services provider, competing against U.S. giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, which dominate the market.
The latest updates from OVHcloud regarding this issue can be found here – http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=49484& and here https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/lp/status-services-backup-strasbourg/
It’s unclear how the fire started at this point.
I am one of the editors here at www.systemtek.co.uk I am a UK based technology professional, with an interest in computer security and telecoms.
Was there anyone inside or have they escaped when the fire started.
OVH stated above: We are relieved that no one was injured, neither among our teams nor among the firefighters and the services of the prefecture, whom we thank for their exemplary mobilization at our side.
This is extremely bad news and the ONLY thing good is the fact there were no injuries or deaths.