A large fire hit a building of the Ovh company, specialized in computer servers, in Strasbourg: the prefecture of the Lower Rhine announced it. of firefighters in the Port du Rhin district, east of the Alsatian capital, not far from the German border.
The prefecture has ruled out that there have been any casualties.
"Everyone is safe and sound," tweeted Octave Klaba, the founder of OVHcloud.
The inefficiencies also affected the sites of some Italian municipalities, which evidently relied on the affected datacenters, including Cattolica, San Giuliano Terme and Pavia.
And also some small companies as can be seen from the notices on social networks.
In Strasbourg, firefighters worked to prevent the fire, which spread through a 4-story building housing the servers, from spreading to other buildings.
Despite a large cloud of smoke, no toxic pollution was detected at the industrial site.
But the fire caused problems for a number of online sites in Strasbourg.
The flames destroyed one of the four buildings, SBG2, company founder Octave Klaba said on Twitter, advising customers to "activate the Disaster Recovery Plan" to safeguard their data.
Access problems also for several institutional sites due to the fire that struck Ovh's Strasbourg plants tonight.
The government website data.gouv.fr this morning proved "unreachable" for a long time, then at 10 it returned to work regularly.
Similar problems also for "Démarches simplifiées", a government website for administrative simplification.
The site of the Strasbourg airport and several social newspapers and apps were blocked, then back in operation.
OVHcloud is the flagship of the French "tech" sector and is finalizing preparations for an imminent listing on the stock exchange.
This was just confirmed by a spokesperson for the company to the newspaper Les Echos, which had taken up information from the Reuters agency.
The transaction should allow the company to increase its visibility and increase investments in order to compete with the American giants.
A company of great ambitions, OVH has announced several partnerships with the world's leading companies in the sector.
In just 3 years, the market share of companies active on the European cloud has gone from 26% to 16%, to the benefit of the US giants, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
To rival them, OVH needs to increase capital to boost investment and increase visibility.
The founder, Octave Klaba and the Board of Directors "have taken the decision to prepare a possible listing on the stock exchange", confirmed the representative of the company contacted by Les Echos.
The ambition of the French company, which is expanding around the world, would have been to achieve a turnover of 1 billion euros for this year.
In Europe it owns 2% of the market and is in 8th place on the continent.