Thousands of Internet sites and services are still inaccessible on Thursday.
Some even wonder if they will be able to find their data.
Around the OVH datacenters in Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), a large part of the servers of which went up in smoke in a fire overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, the investigation continues.
It is an "accidental fire start" which would be at the origin of the disaster, according to a source close to the file.
The origin of the fire "is still very vague," said Octave Klaba, the boss of OVH, in an eight-minute video broadcast late Thursday afternoon on Twitter.
The data center from which the fire started dated from 2011, detailed the company manager.
According to him, in view of the thermal images taken by the firefighters from outside the burning building, two inverters would be involved.
Update March 11 4:40 pm
It's too slow to communicate all these details to you via 280 characters of Twitter.
Here is an 8min concentrate that sums up the situation to date.
(English version is coming) https://t.co/d7BeD7nNpM pic.twitter.com/ugvmLk3EEJ
- Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 11, 2021
“On one of these two inverters, we had interventions in the morning (previous).
A technician who operates maintenance has changed a lot of parts inside.
He put the inverter back on in the afternoon and everything seemed to be working well, ”continued Octave Klaba.
"This speed of propagation questions us"
After the first alarms, at 12:47 am, the technicians on site responded quickly, "but they saw a lot of smoke immediately, so after a minute or two they made the decision to leave the data center because it became. too dangerous to stay indoors, ”the entrepreneur explained.
"This speed of fire, this speed of propagation questions us: how it started, and why it started so quickly", he continued.
"The investigations are underway, there is no certainty for the moment, but this is moving rather towards an accidental track", we also learned from the Strasbourg prosecutor's office.
Given the state of the building, "the experts were not able to make findings inside the building on the start of fire stricto sensu", it was specified.
The investigation was entrusted to the Departmental Security of Bas-Rhin.
VIDEO.
"Financially speaking, it is very very penalizing", says an e-merchant
With the video data that OVH technicians are extracting, "we are going to analyze to understand precisely what happened (...) and draw all the consequences", explained Octave Klaba.
"If there are things to change in the data centers, and there are, we will make the changes so that this situation never happens again," he insisted.
More than 10,000 customers impacted
In total, “12,000 to 16,000 customers were impacted,” according to OVH.
But as some customers are themselves hosts, the number of affected sites is much greater: 464,000 distinct domain names (including 59,600 French) and 3.6 million web servers linked to OVH were inaccessible after the fire, reported the American company Netcraft.
Morning essentials newsletter
A tour of the news to start the day
Subscribe to the newsletterAll newsletters
The fire completely destroyed the data center called SBG2, the starting point of the fire, and partially damaged the SBG1 data center, destroying 4 out of 12 rooms. The other two data centers which were on the site - SBG3 and SBG4 - are stopped due to a general power cut.
The latter two could be restarted on Monday, the third next Friday.
🔥 Fire at the OVH Cloud site in #Strasbourg: around a hundred # Pompiers67 🚒 were mobilized last night, including the Franco-German pump boat Europa1.
The actions taken have made it possible to preserve most of the company's buildings.
COD activated.
No injuries.
pic.twitter.com/RKjI6F9DB7
- SDIS du Bas-Rhin (@ sdis67) March 10, 2021
Thursday, OVH, however, indicated that it was unable to confirm any definitive losses, arguing that, depending on the backups or redundancies subscribed, "there are as many possibilities as there are customers".
If no paid option is taken out, "OVH does not back up customer data and content", specifies the company in its conditions of use of dedicated servers.
In the absence of backups, the destruction of a machine leads to the loss of the data it contains.
The British video game studio Facepunch, publisher of Rust, or the application Meteociel, have announced on Twitter irreversible data loss.
