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OVH Data Center Fire Darkens Popular Sites Worldwide

Fire at an OVH Data Center in Europe takes down millions of sites, including WP Rocket and Imagify

Fire at OVH Data Center

OVH Datacenter in France was engulfed in flames, taking down thousands of sites and businesses including popular plugins WP Rocket and Imagify. A multitude of businesses are tweeting updates to their clients.

Screenshot of OVH Data Center Fire Video

Screenshot of a video of OVH data center fire

A fire engulfed an OVH cloud data center that is located in Strasbourg, France. The fire was initially reported to be uncontrolled but was subsequently controlled by firefighters, who remained on the scene to make sure the building cools down.

New: OVH Fire Outage May Last Until March 22

Update March 11, 2021

The cause of the fire has not been determined.  OVH is reserving new servers at other data centers for affected customers, plus an additional 10,000 new servers in the coming weeks.

OVH announced that they are currently securing the site and  working on a plan to relaunch two unaffected data centers (SBG3 and SBG4) and one partially affected data center (SBG1).

OVH issued a status announcement on their cloud server support page:

“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. If your production is in Strasbourg, we recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan. All our teams are fully mobilized along with the firefighters.”

OVH tweeted that while the fire is over, firefighters remain on the scene cooling down the building. They also tweeted that many of the servers will not be restarted soon.

“Fire is over. Firefighters continue to cool the buildings with the water.
We don’t have the access to the site. That is why SBG1, SBG3, SBG4 won’t be restarted today.”

Sites Affected by OVH Fire

WP Rocket Site is Down

Popular WordPress plugin WP Rocket tweeted that their website is down.

Although the WP Rocket website is down, the plugin is mostly still working.

WordPress Image Optimization Site Imagify

Imagify, with over 400,000 users also experienced downtime because of the fire. Their website was down.

An Imagify plugin user tweeted that they had trouble connecting.

“No wonder I had a server timeout error…”

Images of OVH Fire

There were also images of the building on fire that were posted on Twitter:

More Sites Taken down in the OVH Fire

Many sites are reporting having lost their web presence, with one gaming site anticipating major data loss:

“We’re expecting a large amount of data loss across the affected servers.”

Rust Multiplayer Video Game Site Down

Rust later confirmed that all data was lost and would not be able to be restored.

Video Editor Site Down

The website for the popular open source video editing site Avidemux.org is down.

Truck Simulator site down

Digital Asset Management Library Piwigo.com down

Backups and Emergency Site Restoration

Those who did not backup their data may find themselves in a difficult position. It’s unclear at this time if OVH will be able to restore the data lost on the cloud servers.

Sites that do have a backup should be able to change their DNS to point at another server and upload a new site immediately. But it can take several days for the new DNS settings to propagate. So it’s possible that some sites may take a few days to return.

Thankfully there were no injuries.

Citation

OVH Cloud Announcement
Major Incident Impacting Strasbourg DataCenter

Featured image is a screenshot from this publicly posted video.

Category News
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SEJ STAFF Roger Montti Owner - Martinibuster.com at Martinibuster.com

I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO and have kept on  top of the evolution of search every step ...

OVH Data Center Fire Darkens Popular Sites Worldwide

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