Posted on 03/10/2021 6:29:28 PM PST by yesthatjallen
A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors.
The fire, which broke out on Wednesday shortly after midnight at OVHcloud, destroyed one of four data centres in Strasbourg, in eastern France, and damaged another, the company said.
There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering.
Europe’s largest cloud services provider told clients including the French government, the Centre Pompidou and cryptocurrency exchange Deribit to activate their disaster recovery plans following the blaze.
“Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire” in the affected data centre, founder and chairman Octave Klaba said on Twitter. He said the plan for the next couple of weeks would include rebuilding the centres’ equipment and checking their fiber optic connections.
Some 100 firemen fought the blaze which sent a thick plume of black smoke into the night sky. Video images showed firefighters dousing one smouldering, multi-storey building in the early morning as they cooled down the site.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
I am inclined to see this as suspicious, and part of something larger. Another pin on the corkboard, with a colored thread attached.
That’s one they don’t tell you: a cloud can catch fire.
My website was flooded out for a month or so with the odds of the mid west about 8 years ago
Floods
“Europe’s largest cloud services provider told clients including the French government, the Centre Pompidou and cryptocurrency exchange Deribit to activate their disaster recovery plans following the blaze.”
Are block chains fireproof?
“There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering.”
Are clouds competitive?
Two large weather-related websites went down, meteociel.fr and ndbc.com (national data buoy) which gives information about wind and waves at ocean buoys and from ships. The last reports were at about 1800 GMT yesterday. Neither one had come back up as of last check.
I went to a computer talk 10-12 years ago which started with the speaker saying “I used to do Software as a Service, then I became an Application Service Provider, now I do Cloud Computing.”
The room, most of whom had been around the block a few times, was almost literally ROFLOL at that.
And yes, your graphic sums it up perfectly.
If you follow proper DR practices, you will have a backup data center that is a complete duplicate of the main one, with all the data maintained in both places. You can do this with real-time data replication. To switch over, you just flip the IP addresses.
However, I would imagine their customers are too cheap to pay for that level of service. Well, if you didn’t pay for it, then it’s not in the contract.
One key benefit of cloud computing is geographic failover. Alas, one has to actually BOTHER to configure it!
:-)
Haven’t heard SaaS in a while.
I ran a BBS back in the mid 1980s, Apple //e with 2 modems and the fancy duo floppy drive kit (thanks dad!). Quit when Basic stopped being a functional language, or when I decided girls and cars were more fun. I don’t remember which came first.
A friend of mine had a start-up going in 2001. Their main server was in the Twin Towers. The off-site back-up was in Building 7. Not off-site enough. Friend started a new career.
Which begs the question ... which software? (I was Robo Board)
Good question. I was running a modified version of a game called Proving Ground I think it was; an all text game that earned people gold for winning jousting tournaments and fighting fictional enemies. Sort of an online D&D using basic logic instead of 20 sided dice. I was maybe 14 years old. But it also had chat, so 2 users plus me could chat. It annoyed my mother that I had 2 phone lines but she was befuddled at the idea of 3 people typing at each other. It didn’t actually store the conversations just the player stats, though my old Commodore with the cassette tape drive recorded conversations. Sheesh I remember running out to buy a new Hayes modem it cost more than some computers you can get now. I didn’t actually stop building my own boxes until the early 2000s but switched from Apple to Windows in the early 90s simply because the business software was there.
Yes, and the Outlook mail hacks, as well. These are like exercises, testing our vulnerabilities.
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