NEWS

OVH Fire Outage May Last Until March 22

Published

4 years ago

March 16, 2021

While some OVH fire affected customers are back up and running many others are not so lucky. Many OVHCloud customers are not scheduled to be back up until March 22, 2021, nearly two weeks after the data center fire.

Server customers who have Bare Metal servers in Strasbourg, France will continue to be affected by this outage. The estimated time of recovery is currently March 22, 2021 but this is just an ETA (estimated time of arrival) and not a firm date.

OVH has indicated that affected customers will receive an updated invoice with a suspension of charges.

Customers Complaints About OVH Support

Despite OVH’s steady communication by email, via Twitter, and through their official support page, some customers feel as if they are receiving no support from OVH saying that support calls are going unanswered.

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All I can say is that there has been ZERO help for sbg2 clients since the incident and no response to support calls. Does anyone know how or what service we can get credit for and what terms and conditions they come with???
— dustyrawlins (@dustyrawlins) March 16, 2021
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Another OVH customer tweeted:

“Waiting for their response. Same like us, using SBG2 and now still waiting their update.
Yesterday they told that status for this SBG2, they have the backup. But I’m not sure”

The OVH Support on Twitter is full of anxious customers asking questions in French and English.

OVH Support reassured customers that refunds and compensation were forthcoming to customers whose sites were affected by the data center fire.

Hello, we will communicate about the refund of services affected by the fire, and about the compensation. I assure you, you will not lose money on the service you ordered.
For the new server, it will not be possible to have the same IP address. ^MaxR
— OVHcloud Support FR (@ovh_support_fr) March 16, 2021
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OVH Customer Confusion and Uncertainty

Yet even when some customers were able to reach customer support there seemed to be struggle for OVH to help. One customer tweeted they encountered confused responses from OVH support.

@ovh_support_en I just received an email from you asking me to check where my VPS was located in SBG…but the manager just say’s it doesn’t exist…. it’s vps-4d4f1308
PS. Thanks for all the hard work!
— Jazzy Senpai (@SenpaiJazzy) March 12, 2021

If one person is tweeting about a support issue that may mean there are many more who may be silently suffering.

For example, a domain name database recently sent out an email to customers stating that they are working 24/7 to restore services but had no firm date other than “hopefully” this week, reflecting the lack of information about a firm recovery date for some customers.

OVH’s support page stated:

“Only customers with OVHcloud US who have Bare Metal servers in Strasbourg, France are being impacted by this incident.
All affected customers will be notified about their updated March invoice in the coming days.”

OVH Working Hard to Recover Data Centers

OVH is still working on cleaning up the data centers, reporting that soot cleanup is ongoing in SBG3.

OVH is simultaneously working to restore electricity and restart servers.
According OVH, 30% of the rooms in SBG-1 were damaged. SBG-1 is scheduled to have electricity restored on March 16, 2021 but a gradual restart is not scheduled until March 22nd.

The situation in other areas are as follows:

“SBG-2
– Situation : Building out of use. Structural expertise carried out. Site secured
– Server restart : Replacing infrastructures in other data centers
– Server restart : Provisional ETA: Monday, 22 March for gradual restart
SBG-3
– Situation : Servers undamaged
– Electrical restart : Temporarily re-powered on 12th March and will be restored permanently on 16th
– Server restart : Provisional ETA: Monday, 22 March for gradual restart
SBG-4
– Situation : Servers undamaged
– Electrical restart : Power will return permanently on 16th March
– Network restart : Internal network to be redeployed on 16th March
– Server restart : Provisional ETA: Monday, 22 March for gradual restart”

OVH Data Center Fire Recovery

The recovery appears to be proceeding at a fast but orderly pace. Most customers appear to be understanding. For some customers who didn’t have backups or whose sites will not be able to be recovered on OVH’s end, the after affects will continue to linger.

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