A data center operated by Maxnod has suffered a devastating fire, bringing the French facility offline and severely damaging infrastructure.
There are no reports of casualties or injuries. Update: One firefighter is believed to have been minorly injured.
Local government Ain said that the fire at the Saint-Trivier-sur-Moignans required significant resources, with about 81 firefighters and 49 vehicles mobilized.
Freelance network engineer and president of telco association MilkyWan, Hugues Voiturier, was at the data center when it caught fire at around 11 am local time.
"Well, the Maxnod Datacenter is on fire, fire on the battery room of the photovoltaic panels," he said on Twitter (translated). "Fire not under control. Good luck to all those affected."
In a later message, he said: "Fiber cables burned in the data center so it doesn't smell very good." The machine room appeared to have mostly survived the fire but was covered in soot and water.
While some of the racks looked damaged, Voiturier shared pictures of the MilkyWan servers still intact. "Gear a little dirty but it will be fine."
The 800 square meter data center is Maxnod's only facility, with its website now offline. DCD was unable to contact the company for a statement, but has reached out to Voiturier for more information.
With the data center down, and fiber cables damaged, some outages have been reported, including with local FTTH subscribers.
Data center fires continue to plague the industry, causing huge damage and even the loss of life.
The most notable incident was also in France, when OVHcloud's data center in Strasbourg burnt down. The company is still dealing with the fallout from the incident, after it was revealed OVH stored backup servers in the same data center, and accidentally wiped some of the drives it was able to uncover from the wreckage.
In South Korea, a lithium-ion battery fire was to blame for a KakaoTalk outage that caused chaos in the country, while a power room issue caused a small fire at an Equinix data center.
In 2021, two died at Cyber 1 data center in Jakarta, Indonesia, due to a fire. The cause of the incident was never shared.
Update je suis dans le DC pic.twitter.com/byOMcaMCXR
— Hugues 👨🏼💻 (@huguesdelamure) March 28, 2023