A fire that broke out overnight in Strasbourg, France destroyed one of OVHcloud’s data centers and damaged a second, Reuters reports. The French government and Centre Pompidou, which houses a public information library and modern art museum, had their data affected by the fires, as did Facepunch Studios, maker of the online survival game Rust.
“We’ve confirmed a total loss of the affected EU servers during the OVH data centre fire,” the England-based game developer announced on Twitter this morning. “We’re now exploring replacing the affected servers. Data will be unable to be restored.” It’s not yet clear what started the fire.
Facepunch has slowly been bringing each of the affected servers, all of which were EU-based, back online this morning, though obviously all progress on them has been completely reset. The Rust community is known for sinking thousands of collective hours into crafting complex bases and engaging in elaborate role-play on various servers, where progress is normally only erased with advanced warning as part of monthly updates. “When the world gives you a force wipe,” wrote one player on the Rust subreddit.
The founder of Europe’s biggest cloud computing company, Octave Klaba, said on Twitter today that no one was injured in the fire, but recommended clients activate their Disaster Recovery Plans if they had them.
Several players on the Rust subreddit used last night’s fire as evidence that Facepunch should invest in backups for its gaming servers to safeguard players’ creations. But others pointed out that backups can be very costly, especially for an online multiplayer game that doesn’t charge a subscription. “And as others have said, you are playing on a free server, that rust is arguably losing money on (since you don’t pay to play), so extra money for a backup that is unlikely to be needed and deleted at next wipe is extra burning of money (pun intended),” wrote Reddit user BarryCarlyon.
OVHcloud has pitched itself as a European alternative to US data center giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, Reuters reports. It had also just announced plans for a potential Initial Public Offering (IPO) to go public and get the funding necessary to compete with its counter-parts on the other side of the Atlantic.