OVHcloud confirms no casualties following fire at Strasbourg datacentre campus

OVHcloud has confirmed that no one has been harmed in a fire that broke out and destroyed one datacentre at its server farm campus in Strasbourg, France, in the early hours of Wednesday 10 March.

According to local press reports, the fire broke out at 12.47am today, with the company’s five-storey SBG2 datacentre bearing the brunt of the damage.

In a series of tweets documenting the incident, OVHcloud’s founder, Octava Klaba, confirmed that SBG2 had been destroyed in the blaze, while another datacentre, SBG1, had incurred some damage.

The whole site has been isolated, he said, which is having a knock-on impact on services hosted within all four of the campus’s datacentres, which also include SBG3 and SBG4.

“The goal is to create a plan to restart at least SBG3 and SBG4, maybe SBG1,” said Klaba in an update at 10am.

Shortly after this, he posted again to confirm that all the servers housed within the SBG3 site are OK, and a plan is in place to restart them and reconnect them to its network in due course, but in an earlier tweet, Klaba confirmed that the site’s datacentres will not be restarted today.

A report on French news site DNA said the incident had led to websites across Europe falling offline, with such problems reported in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Turkey.

In a statement to the press, published by DNA, an OVHcloud spokesperson said the firm’s technical and commercial teams were “fully invested” in supporting customers affected by the downtime at its Strasbourg site.

“Our mission is to offer our customers an optimal quality of service to support their online activities and we know the crucial importance that this has for them,” said the spokesperson.

“We offer them our sincere apologies for the hardship this fire is causing them. We are therefore committed to communicating with the greatest transparency on its causes and impacts.”

The French public cloud provider markets itself as a European alternative to the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform and, according a report by Reuters, had started taking steps earlier this week to embark on an initial public offering.

The company operates 27 datacentres across the globe, most of them in France, running facilities in Paris and Roubaix as well as Strasbourg.