A 12-hour fire at a data centre near Amsterdam has knocked out online operations for businesses in the Netherlands and beyond, with IBM one of those affected.
Data centre company NorthC confirmed a fire began at its data centre site in Almere, Netherlands at 08:45 on Thursday morning, with emergency services battling to control it until 20:50 the same day.
As of midnight on Friday 8 May, NorthC said the local fire department had scaled down its operations, and the company’s experts were on site to assess the damage. Nobody was harmed during the incident.
While no servers or data carriers were reported damaged in the fire, which appears to have been limited to the rear of the building, NorthC told public broadcaster NOS it had turned off the power supply after orders from emergency services.
IBM Cloud down
IBM confirmed to the media that it was one of those affected, after numerous reports online that its Amsterdam 03 region was down.
It told The Register: “IBM is aware of a fire at a datacenter in Amsterdam which serves IBM, in addition to others… We are working closely with emergency services, addressing the effect on our operations, and coordinating directly with affected clients to address any impacts.”
NorthC said early Friday that it had acquired a temporary power supply and was working on installing and connecting the site.
According to the local fire department, five fire engines, eight other vehicles, a firefighting robot, and a drone team all attended the site in Almere to assist.
Dutch businesses affected
The effects of the outage have also been felt throughout the Netherlands. The country’s national statistics bureau CBS is still experiencing outages at the time of writing.
Utrecht University closed the “vast majority” of buildings today after experiencing significant issues with its network, applications and website, and a local water board confirmed it had also seen outages connected to the fire.
One of 14 NorthC data centres in the Netherlands, the 26,000m2 Almere site is an 11MW data centre with a 6,870m2 data floor. It boasts of a chilled water redundant cooling system and a double knock, aspiration system for fire prevention.
The link has been copied!
