French cloud computing company OVHcloud has suffered a major disaster at its data center located in Starsbourg, France after a fire ripped through the facility.
The company operates 27 data centers spread across 19 countries and is one of the largest cloud computing providers in the world. In Starbourg, the company has four data center buildings known as SBG1-4. OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba offered an ongoing update regarding what was happening via a Twitter thread starting very early this morning.
As ZDNet reports, it looks as though the fire started in SBG2 and Klaba confirmed that the building has been completely destroyed while SGB1 is partially destroyed, with four of the 12 rooms it contains impacted by the fire. Thankfully no people seem to have been harmed and both SGB3 and SGB4 buildings survived, but have been shutdown for now.
A tweet by Xavier Garreau containing photos of the blaze demonstrate just how serious the situation was before fire fighters managed to bring it under control and ultimately stop the fire spreading further.
Klaba has said the next two weeks will be spent rebuilding the power systems required to get SGB1, SGB3, and SGB4 running again, but also that everything regarding networking needs checking before the data centers can be brought back online. Klaba suggested OVHcloud customers relying on servers at the Starsbourg site "activate your Disaster Recovery Plan."
It's currently unknown what caused the fire to break out. Data centers are locations where only trusted employees are allowed to enter and security is present to help ensure malicious activity can't occur. Fire investigators will hopefully be able to figure out if the blaze was started maliciously, or if some catastrophic hardware failure occurred instead.