Risk of total or partial destruction of a site by fire, worsened by the density of electrical equipment and the difficulty of extinguishing it without further damage.
Data center fire risk refers to the risk of total or partial destruction of a site by fire, a peril worsened by the density of live electrical equipment, the large quantity of cabling and flammable materials present, and the difficulty of extinguishing a fire without causing further damage itself: water damages electronics, and some gas-based suppression systems are not enough to contain a fire that has already taken hold in a dense server room. Compartmentalization between rooms and buildings determines the real scale of the loss: a fire contained to one room causes only a partial loss, while spread across an entire building can amount to a total site loss. Beyond the physical damage, a fire interrupts service for every hosted client, making it both a property damage and a business interruption loss, potentially magnified if the site hosts many clients across varied sectors. For insurers, this peril sits alongside classic industrial property risks, but with insured value concentrated on a small physical footprint and a client digital dependency that far exceeds the physical value of the building itself.
On March 10, 2021, a fire destroyed the SBG2 building at OVHcloud's Strasbourg site and damaged neighboring buildings, cutting access to millions of hosted websites and causing total data loss for clients with no offsite backup.
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