The Strasbourg site of the French host OVH was devastated by a fire on Wednesday morning.

A data center has gone up in smoke, causing problems for many websites.

The technical teams are on the bridge, the intact servers will be relaunched no later than March 19.

But it's going to take some time to get back to normal.

DECRYPTION

A fire quickly brought under control but heavy with consequences: on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, the Strasbourg site of the host OVHcloud was ravaged by flames.

Of the four data centers on the site, one was completely destroyed.

This is a major incident, because it concerns the French leader in web hosting and data storage in the cloud, with tens of thousands of customers, at the very least, in France. .

Enough to blow a wind of panic in companies whose sites have been affected.

OVH is now working to assess the extent of the damage.

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Many websites down

The Strasbourg fire was brought under control around 5.30am Wednesday morning, but it was only the start of a long day for OVH.

The company's customer service, a French nugget valued at more than a billion euros, has been overheating since dawn.

Thousands of customers have called to report technical issues on their site.

And for good reason: OVH hosts, according to some estimates, two-thirds of the French Internet.

We are talking about sites of individuals, companies and public administrations.

Many have thus experienced problems during the day. 

In some cases, such as the Strasbourg airport sites or the UPR, François Asselineau's party, it only lasted a few hours.

But it is more serious for others.

The Center Pompidou site, that of the ASM, the Clermont rugby club, or even the Cityscoot self-service scooter application were still inaccessible at the end of the day.

Schools and universities have also found it difficult to provide distance education.

"Strasbourg did not host sites as such, rather applications making it possible to operate the sites", specifies one at OVH.

Restart servers by March 19

To know the extent of the damage, we will have to wait a bit.

The OVH technical teams obtained authorization to access the Strasbourg site in the middle of the afternoon.

The fire released an impressive column of smoke all night long, but we must not fall into catastrophism.

Already because only one of the four datacenters at the Strasbourg site has been completely destroyed (SBG2).

Another (SBG1) suffered significant damage, estimated at 50%.

The last two (SBG3 and SBG4) are a priori free.

All were shut down as a precaution while the firefighters intervene and OVH takes over.

Update 4pm


We plan to restart SBG1 + SBG4 + the network by Monday March, 15 and SBG3 by Friday March, 19.



In RBX + GRA we have the stock of new servers, pcc, pci ready to be delivered for all the impacted customers.

Of course for free.

We will add 10K servers in the next 3-4 weeks.

- Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 10, 2021

The CEO of the group, Octave Klaba, communicated all day Wednesday via his Twitter account.

He said at the end of the day that a recovery plan had been established.

The SBG1 and SBG4 datacenters will be restarted on Monday March 15 and SBG3 on Friday March 19.

In the meantime, OVH is using "redundancy" to reroute the sites and data affected by the fire to its 15 other datacenters installed in Europe.

Operations carried out at no additional cost to customers.

Various fortunes for clients

Beyond that, you should know that OVH offers all its customers preventive solutions for this type of incident.

This is a slightly more expensive subscription but which allows you to host your site or data on two remote servers at the same time.

This way, if there is one that is destroyed, we can recover everything on the other.

For large companies and the state, there is therefore no need to worry.

Update:


We've confirmed a total loss of the affected EU servers during the OVH data center fire.

We're now exploring replacing the affected servers.



Data will be unable to be restored.

- Rust (@playrust) March 10, 2021

On the other hand, some small businesses that have not subscribed to this offer risk losing valuable data in the flames.

An example is already known, that of the video game

Rust

.

The publisher said it had lost all of its servers in the fire and found itself unable to recover game data.