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Major Data Centre Fire Takes Rust Servers, Chess Network Offline

Alex Walker Avatar
Alex Walker
Major Data Centre Fire Takes Rust Servers, Chess Network Offline

Rust‘s pitch is simple: survive hunger, thirst, the cold and the wild. But what Rust players can’t prepare for is a massive data centre fire, which has caused irreparable damage to 25 Rust servers and taken down major websites and services, including one of the world’s most popular chess engines.

The fire kicked off shortly before midnight local time in Strasbourg, France, where cloud company OVH maintains some of its centres. OVH is the largest cloud computing firm in Europe, and the blaze completely destroyed one of its four data centres in the city. A second data centre was badly damaged, according to Reuters, while the remaining two were taken offline. Fortunately, nobody was hurt in the fire according to a statement.

“We don’t have access to the site. That is why SBG1, SBG3, SBG4 won’t be restarted today,” founder and chairman Octave Klaba announced, with SBG2 being the centre decimated by the fire.

Understandably, one of Europe’s biggest data centre providers shutting down took its toll. From the lens of the gaming world, one of the biggest services impacted was the survival game Rust, which had 25 of its European servers housed in the centre.

The damage is expected to result in “a large amount of data loss across the affected servers”, developers Facepunch announced. There is no expectation that any of the lost data, including any progression players might have made on those servers, will be recovered.

Rust wasn’t the only game affected, but at the time of writing it seems to have been hit with the biggest impact. The team behind TruckersMP, the online multiplayer service and community for Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator, said some of their European servers were affected. Trackmania Turbo was also briefly affected, but a developer confirmed the game was back online within several hours.

Another service impacted was Lichess, a free online chess site and engine rivalling Chess.com. Lichess announced that “several” of their data centres had been lost in the fire, although fortunately almost all of the chess site’s functionality was saved, although it would take some days before everything returned to normal.

In a formal statement, the French cloud company announced that the fire had been contained but clients — including cryptocurrency exchanges and the French government — have been advised to enact their disaster recovery plans. The full damage of the blaze will likely become known over the coming days, although some users are compiling a full list of affected servers, developers, businesses and government pages.

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