Europe's large web hosting provider knocked offline following fire

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A major fire has destroyed a data center of web hosting provider OVH in Strasbourg, France, while severely crippling another, taking many services offline.

News of the catastrophic incident was confirmed by OVH CEO Octave Klaba on Twitter, with a statement on the company's website adding, “We are currently facing a major incident in our DataCenter of Strasbourg with a fire declared in the building SBG2. Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2. The whole site has been isolated, which impacts all our services on SBG1, SBG2, SBG3 and SBG4."

OVH is Europe’s largest hosting provider and the third-largest in the world, and has four data centers in its French facility, namely SBG1, SBG2, SBG3, and SBG4. 

Service disruptions

According to reports, the incident has caused disruptions to several major online services, including the encryption utility VeraCrypt, news outlet eeNews Europe, cryptocurrency exchange Deribit, and several others.

In an update Klaba shared that while one of the data centers has been completely destroyed, firefighters have managed to restrict the damage to another one. 

Thankfully, all staff have been accounted for and are unhurt, and everyone at the site is working to ensure the fire doesn’t spread to the third data center. The fourth one is completely unharmed, but it appears it has been taken offline to prevent damage.

Meanwhile, Klaba urged users to activate their disaster recovery plans in order to minimize the impact of the disruptions caused by its data centers being knocked offline.

Via: BleepingComputer

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.