Fire Has Destroyed OVH’s Strasbourg Data Center (SBG2)

A fire early Wednesday morning destroyed one of OVH’s Strasbourg data centers and part of a second one.

No OVH, firefighting, or local government services staff members were injured, the company, also known as OVHcloud, said.

Many customers of OVH, the largest Europe-native cloud provider, complained on Twitter about downed websites and applications hosted at the campus in Eastern France. Some appeared to not have disaster recovery plans or backup sites.

The cause of the fire had not been determined as of Wednesday morning US Pacific time.

OVH founder and chairman Octave Klaba tweeted about the incident as it was unfolding on Wednesday.

The fire destroyed OVH’s SBG2 data center completely and four rooms in SBG1, according to an incident report on the company's website. UPS was down in the SBG3 facility, and the remaining SBG4 data center had "no physical impact." 

The company said it did not anticipate restoring power to SBG1 and SBG4 until Monday the 15th and SBG3 until Friday the 19th.

Among cloud providers that aren’t the big three (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud), OVH is one of the more popular ones. Just two days ago the company said it had started the process for a potential public listing in Paris.

The fire broke out in one room inside SBG2 just before 1 am local time, according to the incident report. "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 around 4 am, SBG2 was destroyed completely, and the nearby data centers remained under threat until the firefighters eventually brought the fire under control.

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OVH said in a statement:

With our 15 data centers 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.

Most of OVH's 27 data centers are in Europe, with some in North America and Asia Pacific.

In 2017, as VMware was getting out of the cloud service provider business and as OVH was expanding into North America, the French company acquired VMware's vCloud Air business.

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The last big downtime crisis at OVH also happened at the Strasbourg campus. A power outage in 2017 brought the entire campus down. Forty minutes later, its campus in Roubaix lost connectivity due to an unrelated software bug in networking equipment.

DCK will continue reporting on the incident and posting updates as we learn more. If you have relevant information you’d like to share, write to [email protected].