Fire at French data centre disrupts millions of websites

The company has urged clients to activate their disaster recovery plans following the incident

Websites across Europe went offline on Wednesday, after a fire at French cloud services company OVHcloud destroyed one of the site's data centres and forced the temporary shutdown of the remaining three in the local cluster.

OVH said the fire erupted in a room at one of its Strasbourg data centres. No one was injured in the incident, although service disruption continued over Thursday. It is not clear how the fire started.

OVH founder and CEO Octave Klaba said on Twitter that the fire-fighters were immediately called, but could not initially control the blaze.

The fire was fully extinguished later, and firefighters began efforts to cool the site with water spraying.

The fire completely destroyed the SBG2 data centre, Klaba said, as well as damaging SBG1. Fire-fighters made efforts to protect SBG3 and there was no impact on SBG4.

The affected servers hosted nearly 3.6 million websites, including many government platforms in France, the UK, and Poland, according to Reuters.

OVHcloud has urged clients to activate their disaster recovery plans following the incident.

For the next couple of weeks, the company plans to check its fibre optic links and rebuild the centres' equipment.

'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.

Founded in 1999, OVHCloud is now the biggest cloud computing firm in Europe. The company operates 17 data centres in France and 32 globally - competing with US cloud rivals such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. OVH clients include the French government, cryptocurrency exchange Deribit and the Centre Pompidou - one of France's best known art complexes.

Centre Pompidou told Reuters that its website was down following the blaze. Deribit also said its blog was offline, but that trading was not impacted. Free chess server Lichess.org and news outlet eeNews Europe are also among those affected by the blaze.

Developers of the multiplayer video game Rust said some players' progression data had been permanently lost.

Meanwhile, Russia's communication watchdog Roskomnadzor, which announced this week that it was slowing the speed of Twitter in the country, has also blamed the OVH fire for a Google outage in the country.

The incident occurred just two days after OVH announced plans for a potential IPO this week.