Millions of Websites Offline After Fire at French Cloud Services Firm

(REUTERS)

A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors.

(more…)

The fire, which broke out on Wednesday shortly after midnight at OVHcloud, destroyed one of four data centres in Strasbourg, in eastern France, and damaged another, the company said.

There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering.

(more…)

“Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire” in the affected data centre, founder and chairman Octave Klaba said on Twitter. He said the plan for the next couple of weeks would include rebuilding the centres’ equipment and checking their fiber optic connections.

Some 100 firemen fought the blaze which sent a thick plume of black smoke into the night sky. Video images showed firefighters dousing one smouldering, multi-storey building in the early morning as they cooled down the site.

(more…)

Founded by Klaba in 1999, OVHcloud competes against U.S. giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp’s Azure and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud, which dominate the market.

Source: Reuters.com