Fire at OVH data center takes Centre Pompidou website offline

A fire at OVH's Strasbourg data center on the night of March 9-10, 2021, knocked thousands of websites offline, including the Centre Pompidou's. The blaze hit the SBG2 facility; SBG1, SBG3, and SBG4 were isolated as a precaution. OVH, Europe's largest hosting provider with 32 data centers in 19 countries and over 1.5 million clients, advised users to activate emergency recovery plans, per founder Octave Klaba. Affected sites included eeNews Europa, Strasbourg Airport, and government portal data.gouv.fr, which later came back online. In Italy, municipal sites like Cattolica, San Giuliano Terme, and Pavia were also impacted. The Centre Pompidou posted a message on its homepage explaining the outage and directing visitors to its social media channels.