Digital Realty Singapore data center fire (2024)

The Digital Realty Singapore data center fire is the fire that broke out on September 10, 2024 in a lithium-ion battery room at the site and took an Alibaba Cloud availability zone offline for several days. Alibaba Cloud reported an anomaly in one zone of its Singapore region (ap-southeast-1) almost immediately, followed by an outage hitting compute, storage and databases hosted in that zone. Recovery stretched over several days while smoke was cleared, hardware inspected and power restored in stages; some customers migrated to other zones, others waited it out. The case is a textbook one because it stacks contracts. The building belongs to a colocation operator, the cloud provider leases space and power there, and Alibaba's end customers usually know neither the address nor the operator of the site. A contingent business interruption cover drafted around the named cloud provider alone does not necessarily reach the colocation landlord upstream, and the underwriter has to read the definition of service provider to know whether the chain holds. The event is also a reminder that an availability zone can sit in a third-party building, possibly shared with other clouds or other companies. Physical damage stays with Digital Realty's insurer for the building and with Alibaba's for its equipment. The largest share of the economic loss, though, lands with Alibaba's customers, as business interruption without any damage on their own premises, which sends it to their cyber policies or their contingent extensions.