A year after the massive fire that ripped through one data center of web hosting provider OVH, while severely crippling another and taking many services offline, the company has revealed multiple factors that contributed to the fire's destruction.
A report from the Bas-Rhin firefighters states that it all started with an electrical inverter that caught fire on the first floor of a 5-story building in Strasbourg, France.
When firefighters arrived, they were hit by "more than a meter of arc around the outer door of the power room" where the fire first broke out, according to the report.
Collective action of one hundred and forty people
"The technicians of the ES (Electricité de Strasbourg) encountered difficulties to cut electricity at the facilities." It took them two hours to cut the power. The building did not have a power cutoff mechanism, according to the report.
It also lacked an automatic extinguishing system.
The toxic gases from burning lead batteries only made matters worse, while the wooden ceiling covering the rooms could only withstand the fire for an hour. Adding insult to injury, two inner courtyards were described as "fireplaces."
The temperature in the room below reached four hundred degrees, as determined by firefighters using a thermal camera.
OVH is the largest cloud hosting provider in Europe and the third largest on the planet, and has 4 data centers in its French location, namely SBG1, SBG2, SBG3 and SBG4.
The crash caused outages across multiple major online services, including encryption utility VeraCrypt, news outlet eeNews Europe, cryptocurrency exchange Deribit, and multiple others. Multiple French government sites were also affected by the fire, including data.gouv.fr, the National Education site, the Pompidou Center site and Meteosky.
Fortunately, all the staff were found and unharmed.
The registry indicates that more than one hundred and forty customers of the service have filed a class action lawsuit seeking damages for the losses.
Via: The Registry