Fire in Strasbourg Data Center Caused Google, YouTube Access Issues in Russia, Watchdog Says

On Wednesday, some users from Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Latvia reported issues with access to YouTube, Google and other services, Sputnik reports. The issues began at 12:23 p.m. Moscow time (09:23 a.m. GMT).

Issues with access to Google, YouTube and other internet services that some Russian users might have encountered earlier on Wednesday were caused by an incident in a Strasbourg data center and have no connection to the temporary slowdown of Twitter traffic, Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor told Sputnik.

“Issues with accessing international services Google, YouTube and a number of others that some Russian users might have encountered on 10 March, were caused by a disruption in the operation of a large European data center located in Strasbourg,” Roskomnadzor said.

The media watchdog stressed that the incident in the Strasbourg data center was not related to the restrictions imposed on Twitter in Russia earlier in the day.

A fire broke out in the facilities of Europe’s largest cloud services provider, OVHcloud, on Wednesday night and destroyed several servers by morning.

​French OVHcloud is one of the major rivals to U.S. giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud in the cloud services market. The firms’ clients include the French government, the Center Pompidou and cryptocurrency exchange Deribit. The Strasbourg data centers were among OVHcloud’s 17 data centers in France, and 32 globally.