OVH CEO Octave Klaba apologizes and provides updates about SBG2

This raises the question, "How could Octave be so tone-deaf?"

Should they be sending emails? Yes, of course. But, you’re being hyperbolic. It’s always, otherwise, Twitter or a status page on their website.

SBG is OVH Strasbourg, a complex of data centres that are adjacent to each other, but which were not built at the same time and are architecturally not the same. Yes, SBG1-4 are the different buildings. Some of them are made from stacked shipping containers, but SBG2 was an actual building.

SBG2 basically burned to the ground. The fire also spread into SBG1 if I remember correctly: parts of SBG1 were destroyed but some parts are intact. SBG3 and 4 are also intact. Under the circumstances the entire complex is offline at the moment though, which is not surprising given the scale of the fire and the firefighter response. The photos reminded me of the WTC attack, which shut down lower Manhattan for months.

SBG2 was built like a vertical tunnel, a quadrangle of server rooms with a huge air shaft in the middle, intended to convection-cool the servers through the natural motion of the rising air through it as the air was warmed by the servers. In this case it may have resulted in something like a firestorm, where the fire maintained its own airflow through that column.

I'd be interested to know if there is any hope and/or intention in this situation to recover possibly-operable hard drives from the charred servers for data recovery purposes.

I couldn't believe the complaints about the audio in that mp4. I could understand him perfectly well except a few times his accent got in the way. Better audio wouldn't have mattered much.

Honestly, nobody lost their lives, the impact is pretty much limited to OVH (who need to find a new building), their customers (who need to find new servers and restore backups), and the city of strasbourg (who run the emergency services and presumably will have some involvement in the cleanup). While we're all interested in a "Oh, are we prepared if that happened to our provider?" sense, I don't see why OVH is obliged to provide communications to us, rather than to their customers.

I would expect the communication to be directly targeted to customers not the general public.

But ... the video isn't for a general audience. He doesn't have any reason to apologize to a general audience. His customers are the only people that matter in this situation and this video is for them.