Major fire in OVH data center causes data loss

A major fire at a data centre of the French telecommunications and internet service provider OVH SAS has resulted in huge amounts of data stored in the cloud being irretrievably lost.

What happened?

For reasons yet to be determined, a fire broke out on Wednesday, 10th March 2021, at a data centre of the web hosting provider OVH in Strasbourg, France. The fire started in the early hours at data centre SBG2 and then spread to the adjacent data centre SBG1. Data centre SBG2 was completely destroyed, and significant parts of data centre SBG1 also fell victim to the flames. Other adjacent buildings housing data centres SBG3 and SBG4 were protected from the fire by the fire brigade but had to go completely offline. Fortunately, no individuals were harmed in the fire.

What are the consequences of the fire?

As a result of the fire, around 3.6 million websites experienced outages. In addition to numerous small private and business websites, websites of government agencies, online banking portals, webmail services, news sites, and online shops were also affected. The incident is particularly frustrating for customers whose data was irretrievably lost in the fire. Many customers had their backups stored exclusively in the cloud hosted by OVH, resulting in both the original data and backup data being destroyed by the fire. One prominent affected party is the British video game developer Facepunch Studios, which lost all 25 of its servers located in the EU for the popular survival game Rust. While the servers have since been replaced, numerous player data could not be restored.

How can data loss be prevented?

The increasing prevalence of cloud services leads users to always believe their own data is secure. The fear of losing important data due to a broken laptop or stolen smartphone has been increasingly minimized thanks to the cloud. However, it is often forgotten that behind the always available and accessible cloud is actually just a normal server on-site in a data centre. And this is also susceptible to disruptions and outages. Therefore, whether it's a private web hosting package or a professional cloud server, to avoid data loss, one should always pay attention to an optimal backup strategy, where the data is stored in multiple different, physically independent locations.

More information on the topic of backup and data security can be found in the following guide articles:

Why every website needs a backup

Securing your homepage - How to create a backup of your own website

Backing up a WordPress web hosting

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