A major fire at a Strasbourg data centre has destroyed infrastructure belonging to French cloud service provider OVHCloud.

According to the company’s chief executive, Octave Klaba, a large part of its SBG2 data centre was destroyed, along with parts of a second, SBG1. Additionally, two other data centres on the same site, SBG3 and 4 have been closed.

“We have a major incident on SBG2. The fire declared in the building. Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2. The whole site has been isolated which impacts all services in SGB1-4. We recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan,” he said in a tweet.

While SBG3 and 4 were unaffected by the fire, they were shut down and disconnected from the network.

Klaba added that the company now plans to rebuild its capacity over the next week or two, with the SBG1 and 4 coming online by March 15.

There are currently no reports as to what caused the fire.

While nobody was injured in the fire, it has destroyed data and caused disruptions to a variety of services. With OVH providing cloud services for around 1.6 million customers around the world, the disruptions have proved far reaching.

One major implication of the blaze is for cybersecurity – Kaspersky Lab’s Director of the Global Research and Analysis Team Costin Raiu tweeted that 36% of the 140 OVH servers his company tracks that are used by government-backed and criminal enterprise hackers have gone down since the blaze.

According to him, these include Iran-linked Charming Kitten and APT 39, Indian hackers-for-hire Bahamut, Vietnam’s OceanLotus.

The servers are generally used by criminal groups to control malware. However, he noted that large hacker groups rarely use a single server and are unlikely to group all their servers in one place to mitigate risks.

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The fire has been blamed by Russian authorities for disrupting services from Google and YouTube in the country.

The news comes right as Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor said it had throttled the speed of another major US tech company, Twitter, over claims it had failed to remove content related to suicide, pornography and drugs.

In addition, it is believed to have affected the online services of the French government, Paris’ Pompidou Centre, and cryptocurrency exchange Deribit. PR agency Caroline Charles Communication claimed that it had lost access to emails due to the fire.

Video game services have also been affected – popular multiplayer game Rust has warned that some player save data has been irretrievably lost after 25 servers were destroyed in the fire.

The process of restoring data from backups could prove long and difficult for many companies. However, for small companies and individuals, who are unlikely to have data recovery plans, the data loss may will prove irreversible.

In addition, GDPR regulations require companies to have Data Loss Protection (DLP) plans in place. As such, the consequences of the Strasbourg Data Centre Fire are likely still to be felt.