3.6 million websites offline after OVH data center fire

Around 3.6 million websites across 464,000 distinct domains were taken offline after a major fire last night at an OVHcloud data center in Strasbourg.

More than 18% of IP addresses assigned to OVH on web servers – which occurred two weeks ago – were no longer responding at 06:00-07:15 UTC this morning.

Fortunately, everyone is safe and sound, but OVH declared that the fire at its SBG2 Datacenter was not controllable and that no data is likely to be recovered. Part of its SBG1 Datacenter was also destroyed. Firefighters protected SBG3 throughout the night, and although there was no direct impact of the fire on SBG4, it was also unavailable due to the isolation of the assembly of the site. As a result, all services of SGB1-4 have been offline.

Websites that were taken offline during the fire included online banks, webmail services, news sites, online stores selling PPE to protect against coronavirus, and government websites from several countries.

These include sites used by the Polish Financial Ombudsman, the Ivorian DGE, the French State Purchasing Platform, the Welsh Government Export Hub and the Government Vehicle Certification Agency site. UK, which obtained a new SSL certificate at 10am and is now back online with a UK host.

As would be expected from a French hosting company, the most affected country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is .fr, which had 184,000 out-of-service websites spread across 59,600 distinct domain names, or 1.9% of all .fr domains worldwide. For comparison, the affected data centers hosted just 24,100 .uk websites, spread across 8,700 unique domain names. Most of the affected websites use the generic top-level domain .com, representing 880,000 websites across 180,000 domains.

OVH published an update on its page Fire at the Strasbourg site, And an incident report suggests it may take two weeks to rebuild some of the destroyed infrastructure.