In March of 2021, a fire occurred in OVHcloud‘s data center campus in Strasbourg, France. The fire destroyed the five-story SBG2, damaged servers in SBG1. The incident report published by the Bas-Rhin fire service shows that the facility had no automatic fire extinguisher system nor an electrical cutoff mechanism.
Electrical inverter
The report states that the fire started with an electrical inverter that caught fire on the first floor. When the firefighters arrived, they noticed electric arcs of more than one meter around the exterior door of the energy room, where it all began. The report also says that technicians had difficulties in cutting off the electricity in the room. The building didn’t have a cutoff mechanism, which caused them to took two hours to cut the power.
Other factors that increased the effect of the incident were toxic fumes, caused by the burning lead batteries and the wooden ceiling that could only resist the fire for an hour. As a result, over 100 customers’ services were affected by the fire and they filed lawsuits for their losses. Thankfully, no one was hurt in the incident.
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