Hosting company GigeNet Hosting had to shut down its Chicago-area data center after a smoke detector went off Wednesday, causing outages for customers from around the world.

The company first indicated something was wrong around 2pm Pacific, tweeting that it was experiencing “technical difficulties.” Shortly thereafter, a post appeared on GigeNet's Twitter feed saying the outage was a result of a smoke alarm, followed by a request from the local fire department.

“There was some smoke, fire department made us turn off electricity. Customers will be back online in 1-2 hours,” the tweet read. The company's website was down, as were websites of some of its customers.

GigeNet owns and operates the 17,000 sq ft data center in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb. It also has a data center in Los Angeles, which it recently expanded, and plans to add an East Coast facility in the near future.

The company assured its Twitter followers that the outage affected the Chicago location only.

One of the customers affected by the outage was Chicago-based ServiceBridge, whose application helps companies manage interactions with clients.

“Our hosting provider @gigenet is down,” a ServiceBridge representative wrote in a tweet addressed to customers. “No services are working, but data captured on app is saved on mobile device.”

ServiceBridge's website remained down as of 3:30pm Pacific time.

Another affected customer was Mobile PC Monitor, a Dublin, Ireland-based company with a mobile IT monitoring and control solution. Its tweet about the outage read: “Our hoster Gigenet seemed to have had a fire in the data center and working to get us back online as soon as possible.”

The hosting company replied, pointing out that there was no fire, only a smoke alarm.

The website of Expresito Carga, a shipping company that delivers containers between Latin American countries and North America, was inaccessible as well.