The OVHcloud data center fire

The fire that destroyed a data center (and damaged others) at the OVHcloud facility in Strasbourg, France, on March 10-11, 2021, has raised a multitude of questions from concerned data center operators and customers around the world. Chief among these is, What was the cause, and could it have been prevented?

Fires at data centers are rare but do occur — Uptime Institute Intelligence has some details of more than 10 data center fires (see Note 93). But most of these are quickly isolated and extinguished; it is extremely uncommon for a fire to rage out of control, especially at larger data centers, where strict fire prevention and containment protocols are usually followed. Unfortunately for OVHcloud, the fire occurred just two days after the owners announced plans for a public listing on the Paris Stock Exchange in 2022.