A fire closed down Colt’s Milan data center on Monday July 6, taking the company’s cloud services there offline for several hours. 

The Tier III Milan site suffered “utility power outages” according to a statement from Colt, but Twitter revealed the data center had experienced a fire, which may have been caused by overheating in the building’s power infrastructure, according to a report on TechWeekEurope.

Overheating in Milan 

Fire at Colt data center Milan
Fire at Colt data center Milan – @GazzettaAdda, Twitter

”Colt experienced utility power supply outages at its Milan Lancetti Data Centre on July 6th,” the company said in a statement. ”The vast majority of customer services have been fully restored and the utility power supply is stable. Colt continues to monitor the situation closely and is taking every possible action to mitigate risk for our customers.”

Colt’s data center at Lancetti offers ”state-of-the-art technology, resilience and 24/7 security”, according to the company’s website. It has 4MVA of power available on site.

Mauro Toselli, @xLontrax on Twitter, tweeted: ”Datacenter by @Colt_Technology in Milan via Lancetti completely dark! Huge power down!”  and @GazzettaAdda tweeted a photo of firefighters at the site. 

With temperatures recently reaching 38°C in Milan, overheating in the power supplies seems like a reasonable guess as to the cause of the problem.

In June a BT data center in Belfast was taken offline by a fire, disrupting the Internet in Northern Ireland.