Fire at Telecom Egypt data centre kills four and injures 26

What happened

On 7 July 2025 a fire broke out in an equipment room at the Ramses switchboard of Telecom Egypt, on the seventh floor of a 10-storey building in the Ramses area of Cairo. The fire lasted for hours. Four workers died and 26 people were injured. The cause has not been reported. Fixed internet, mobile networks and some other services, including online payments and air traffic, were disrupted for a time. An outage tracker reported connectivity at 62 percent of normal levels. The fire was later brought under control and fixed internet traffic was transferred to an interchange centre at Al-Rawda Central.

Contributing factors

It was reported that the building's fire suppression system was overwhelmed by the intensity of the flames. The cause of the fire has not been reported.

Lessons learned

1. Fire suppression in multi-storey telecom and data centre buildings should be matched to the fire load in equipment rooms, because an intense fire can overwhelm a system.
2. Operators of national interconnection hubs should keep tested plans to reroute circuits quickly if one building is lost.
3. After a fatal equipment-room fire, the cause should be established and shared so other operators can check similar rooms.

Source

datacenterdynamics.com