Millions of websites offline after fire at French cloud services firm | Hacker News Reader

Millions of websites offline after fire at French cloud services firm

reuters.com

See current discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26407323

> “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.“

Very interesting.

The simplest explanation (Occam's razor) is that the events are unrelated. Speculation on that, and then citing and further spreading the idea around that maybe there are people against OVH, seems pointless (perhaps even harmful to the company) unless there are some signs of arson or people unhappy with the announcements or anything.

Occam's razor - someone got mad due to IPO and torched the place

Simpler than whatever you're impling a

Is it simpler? Are fires set by angry people more common than fires that happen by neglect, stupidity or equipment failure?

That's not simpler because it throws up more questions. Who would want that, how did they get access, how did they plan it do quickly, how they know to target this specific one, etc.

Simple is: fires happen in buildings due to failures. There was a nonhuman failure like in millions of other cases. No need for a conspiracy.

Otherwise, with your logic, god explains everything because "it's simple"

As others mention OVHCloud does host VPS's and seedboxes, which have many legitimate users but can be used for crime especially when VPS providers accept Bitcoin and other difficult to track currencies.

It was only a few days ago that it was been announced there is an unprecedented hack in progress of Microsoft Exchange / Outlook Web App that is reportedly being launched by the HAFNIUM hacking group in China using VPSs hosted around the world.

I'm not saying arson is involved, but the possibility of arson needs to be impartially investigated. Admittedly, the falsifiability of the theory is also difficult, because even tracing back the fire to an electrical fault doesn't immediately preclude it from being a deliberate act.

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/03/a-basic-timeline-of-the-...

Sounds like a UPS failure. Here's an example: https://youtu.be/tzHbFzF6W20

Same thing happened at Markley in Boston: https://www.universalhub.com/2018/shorting-power-supplies-sp...

However due to functioning fire suppression measures it didn't burn the entire building down.

I only intended to say that it’s an interesting coincidence and if I was the police I’d investigate.

With any fire there’s always the possibility of arson. With fires that impact commercial real estate I’d be surprise if the occurrence of arson is not more common.

It’s just interesting that’s all.

This kind of thing serves me as a reminder of how "physical" our "digital" really is ...

Yes but no. Sure, millions of websites offline, most likely websites that run on single servers, in one data center. Hardly "our" digital reality is stored there, but more like personal artifacts or smaller businesses.

Our digital reality lives much further than that, and is what makes up the web. It's not run on one server, sometimes in a magical cloud of instances, living in harmony.

> sometimes in a magical cloud of instances, living in harmony.

That's part of the point here, I think: They are far from magical and, at some level, they are "physical" ...

Let's call it a "gentle" reminder, then :)

Says a lot about the robustness and degree of centralization of the internet that one data-center going up in flames takes a non-trivial chunk of French domains offline, including government websites.

It reminds me of that story recently about the hack on that water recycling plant in the US that was only barely caught and could have poisoned a city. A lot of infrastructure really operates in barely secure fashion.

>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.

That pretty much sums up why the fire started

Meh on the websites offline.

What about the seedboxes??? The private VPNs? The FTPs? The ownclouds?

Anything big would have had some redundancy, but the little guys didn’t.

You just made me panic and check my seedbox. Still there.

What setup do you use? I had deluge-web in a container but it would corrupt the files for some reason.

rtorrent (with rutorrent) scales better, and unless you're using the deluge-gtk client, seems generally preferrable. Oh, and the core isn't in (relatively) slow Python.

transmission-daemon with the web GUI.

> The private VPNs?

Those are stateless, just open one up in a new place.

> The ownclouds?

That's one of the few things that should literally refuse to run unless you prove you have backups on a different network. (not technically possible to verify of course) Without it, you will lose data at some point.

"Millions of websites".... I have not noticed even one going off-line, but I guess France has it's own internet, a bit like North-Korea or China?

Anyways, how hard is it to spin up another VPS and relocate your website there?

OVH Definitely hosts a lot of seedboxes.

The article mentions that it’s website’s from across Europe that were hosted there, not just France sites.

Also every country has a lot of local websites, think government and small to medium local businesses.

Also, because of the Europe focus, a disproportionate number of those affected won't be in English. They will be in French, German, Italian etc.

Part of HN's bias is at times because of the US focus, namely Silicon Valley there is quite a information bubble about what actually goes on in the world of nearly 8B people compared to the "mere" 300M in the US. Starting to lose count of the number of people claiming today they have never even heard of OVH despite it's scale. When I did my European education, the number 1 provider used in university was OVH.

If millions of sites are down, and you haven't been impacted by it today, guess what, you are in that bubble.

I for one know that a number of Wordpress plugins are currently borked and Lichess was affected.

Interesting point about the info bubble. Hope people had backup/replication plans. The expensive but good side of this might be that OVH will look carefully at their setup and prevent future versions of fires like this and customers will check over their backup/replication plans. It'd be interesting (though probably impossible to do) to find out how many people didn't have plans setup for this kind of thing.

I'm not French but I have 6 websites on a server at OVH. Luckily they are in another data center. I didn't remember where they are so I was thinking about how to resurrect them from backups while I was typing the URL to check if they were not burned down.

OVH is pretty popular in Europe. I particularly didn't notice much, but I have friends pretty angry in my timeline.

I want to see the postmortem, because that thing brunt like gasoline. Maybe stacking containers is not that good idea after all?

I have more than 10 sites hosted in tiny datacenters here in Spain. I wonder how would they do in an event like this.

Judging by maps and images online, you wouldn't tell it's a datacenter. One is from a local telco, the other one is this one, that almost looks cute, doesn't look very sofisticated: https://www.google.es/maps/place/NIXVAL/@39.5196459,-0.46779...

I have to say It's been about 7 years in Nixval and I don't remember anything happening, but it seems I shouldn't expect much though.

Edit: They have videos and photos where you can see batteries, what it looks like pipes for fire supression etc. I stand corrected.

Where in the world are you from, where people hold such a view of France? Sounds outer-wordly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com