Fire sends OVHcloud Strasbourg data centres up in flames

SBG2 completely destroyed impacting services hosted in Strasbourg

A fire has engulfed at least one OVHcloud data centre in Strasbourg, France prompting the cloud provider to urge customers to kickstart disaster recovery plans.

The company, which operates 27 data centres across the US, UK, France and Australia, has been forced to halt its Strasbourg operations while it continues to contain the blaze and protect its infrastructure.

OVHcloud operates four facilities in Strasbourg in close proximity to each other, SBG1, SBG2, SBG3 and SBG4.

Clarifying the situation on Twitter, founder and chairman Octave Klaba said SBG2 had been completely destroyed after firefighters failed to control the fire there.

“The whole site has been isolated which impacts all services in SBG1-4,” said Klaba, adding that no staff or personnel had been injured.

It is understood SBG1 has been partly destroyed and firefighters were able to protect SBG3. SBG4 was unaffected by the incident.

These three facilities will remain offline while firefighters continue to cool the buildings with water, Klaba added.

“We recommend [you] activate your Disaster Recovery Plan,” Klaba urged.

An initial assessment of SBG3 suggests all of the facilities servers are still in working order and OVH is working on a restart plan. The situation in SBG1 is less clear and OVH are continuing the gauge the impact of the blaze there.

“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,” Klaba said.

Given the stringent security protocols at data centres and their comprehensive environmental monitoring, questions will be raised as to how such a catastrophic fire emerged at the facilities. OVHcloud is one of the leading non-hyperscaler cloud providers in Europe.