Servers OVH
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OVH servers are still unreachable after the fire in Strasbourg

OVH servers, a long tail of damages after the fire: hundreds of sites still unreachable, thousands of data has been lost

OVH data centers servers went up in smoke following a fire about three weeks ago. Many customers, thanks to previous backups, have recovered full functionality, but just as many others have irretrievably lost their clouds that were on OVH servers. There is also the resounding persistence of dysfunctions for some sites, such as that of the Centre Pompidou, which is still in half service. OVHcloud was expected to enter the stock exchange and, in the intentions of the government, be a serious alternative to the hosting services of Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Here’s how the French company framed its customers with small clauses in the contracts.

The consequences of the fire of OVH servers

18 days ago, during the night between 8th and 9th of March, the Strasbourg-based datacentre of OVH, one of Europe’s leading cloud service providers, was hit by a fire. The flames were put out after hours of work, but the OVH servers remained completely unreachable for ten days. Currently, several companies affected by the disruption have recovered access to their sites, but many others have lost their data altogether. This, especially for those who work with online content, is creating huge problems.

OVH servers
OVH servers during the fire.

The Centre Pompidou, for example, still does not have the site available in its entirety. Among the other victims of the downturn are the online gaming platform Rust, which has totally lost the cloud, VeraCript, New Radio and Digital Metrics. But these are just a handful of the thousands of European companies that were left stranded.

OVH keeps denying responsibility for server backups

To make the situation even worse, the provider has totally disavowed any responsibility in the loss of clouds. If you read between the endless clauses of OVH’s contract, the one that many customers signed over the years, you can read the following lines:

OVHcloud does not make any particular backup of the content stored within the Services. Therefore, the Customer is solely responsible for taking all necessary measures to safeguard his data in order to protect them against the risk of loss or alteration, regardless of the cause.

And again:

OVHcloud is not responsible for loss, damage, alteration of all or part of the content (including information, data, applications, files or other elements) present in the Infrastructure.

OVH, possible refunds and class actions

In a nutshell, the French company traces what happened to a cause of “force majeure“, in which precisely the case of fire falls. So it would have been the responsibility of the individual customer to periodically back up their online data. The situation, however, would change dramatically if it were found that OVH had been guilty of intent or gross negligence behind the fire. In this case, the provider would be forced to pay damages to the one million customers who saw their traffic go down for more than ten days.

At the moment, such refunds have not arrived, but several coalitions, such as the one led by Polimeni.Legal, are initiating a class action against server provider OVH. If no concrete results are forthcoming then a legal action is likely.

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