A fire in a data center is a bad time for everyone involved. When a UPS or battery explodes, which can happen, it’s a bad thing for nearby servers. It’s especially bad for online games when their servers are in the same datacenter that’s in the midst of trying to burn down. And when it really gets bad, things can be turned upside down for millions of users and businesses. A fire has affected a major hosting provider, OVH, who also provided hosting for various games. In this case, there’s a Rust data center fire to worry about.
According to Eurogamer, the fire happened at an OVH data center in Strasbourg, France. The CEO of OVH, Octave Klaba confirmed that one building, SBG2, was totally destroyed. That leaves OVH struggling to salvage data that they can, while also dealing with millions in damages. The fire has led to a full shutdown for three different server clusters, aside from the one that has been entirely lost.
The affected customers are many, but a major online game, Rust, has had a major outage. The servers at OVH storing player account data for the game were lost. The future of the game is unclear, as they will have to reset progress that can’t be restored. According to Facepunch, the game’s saves for character data has been wiped. According to Facepunch, that data has been completely destroyed. It would seem like the company didn’t have off-site backups, possibly due to the volume of data stored.
Photos of the damaged data center were shared by Microsoft cybersecurity specialist Kevin Beaumont. The only good thing from this nightmare is that no one was injured in the fire. Have a fire plan, businesses.
So for now, players should treat this whole mess as essentially a data wipe. Any progress attached to your account on official servers should be considered lost, unless there are other circumstances involved. So it may as well be like any other reset for players. It really does suck for OVH to have to deal with this kind of thing, but it happens. So at the very least, no one was hurt.
