Battery room fire cuts power to hosting servers in Strasbourg

What happened

On the morning of Thursday 21 March 2024 a small fire broke out in the room that houses the batteries for the emergency power supply at a GoDaddy data centre in Strasbourg, France, according to a GoDaddy spokesperson. The company said the fire was quickly extinguished and the damage was limited. To protect people and prevent further damage, power was cut to part of the servers in the facility. Among the affected servers were those of the German hosting providers Plusserver and Server4You, which went offline.

Support staff statements suggested water was also involved after the battery room fire, although GoDaddy did not officially describe it as water damage. GoDaddy did not say how many units lost power. Plusserver moved its hardware by lorry to its data centre in Cologne and had 95 per cent of its IT systems back in operation by the evening of Sunday 24 March, with the remainder live on Monday. Server4You still had many servers offline on 26 March, when its support said power restoration was being prepared. The collaboration tool Conceptboard, also hosted there, attributed its outage to a fire followed by interrupted power supply and water damage.

Contributing factors

A fire in the battery room serving the emergency power supply. Statements from support staff suggest water was involved after the fire, but GoDaddy did not confirm water damage. The power cut to part of the facility was a precautionary step taken to protect equipment and people. The sources do not describe whether failover to another site was available, aside from Plusserver moving its hardware to Cologne.

Lessons learned

1. Battery rooms supporting emergency power need fire detection, suppression and isolation arrangements that contain a local fire without taking down unaffected parts of the facility.
2. Hosting customers who rely on a single facility should test geographic redundancy and recovery plans, since outages here lasted several days.
3. Operators should set out in advance how water from suppression or firefighting is managed near electrical equipment, and should give customers clear, factual updates on the scope and expected duration of an outage.

More lessons on detection and monitoring, outages, backup supply and restoration, fire suppression and firefighting, from every incident on the register.

Source

heise.de