A fire at a New Delhi data centre owned by Singapore's ST Telemedia and Tata Communications resulted in "extensive damage" to portions of the facility, making data recovery difficult, according to a Tata letter obtained by Reuters.
Following an early morning fire at the STT Global Data Centres India plant, the company, which is a part of the salt-to-aviation Tata conglomerate, informed Indian stock markets on June 5 that it has initiated business continuity processes to minimise interruptions.
Matrix Cellular, an Indian data centre client that offers worldwide SIM cards, told Reuters that it is having difficulty recovering two decades' worth of data that was lost in the fire. According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the event is also connected to some of Google Cloud's sporadic network outages in India.
On the day of the fire, television news footage from inside the building revealed server racks and electrical infrastructure that seemed to have been totally destroyed, ceiling panels that had collapsed, and debris scattered across the floor.
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In the June 15 letter, which has not been previously disclosed, Novamesh of the Tata Communications business informed a client that the fire was "so severe that it caused extensive damage" to areas of the facility and delayed services.
In the letter to Matrix Cellular that Reuters examined, it stated, "Despite our ongoing best efforts to recover the data, the severity of the damage ... presents significant challenges to the recovery of the affected data and systems."
According to Delhi fire authorities, the fire started in lithium battery units, although its exact cause is still unknown. CEO Gaurav Khanna told Reuters that Matrix may no longer have access to more than 20 years' worth of accumulated operational and business data kept in the impacted Tata data centre. "They still haven't restored the backup after 20 days. It ought to have been restored by now if there was a backup," he added.
Google stated on its occurrences page on June 9 that "a fire at a third-party data centre facility required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment" without mentioning Tata.
The insider, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the situation, stated that Google's modifications were related to the same STT-Tata website.
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Google stated in its most recent update on June 23 that there was currently no fix and cautioned users that they would experience latency problems until the facility was completely restored.
According to its CEO, Sanjay Singh, another client, Indian internet service provider R2 Net, is expected to lose $2 million as a result of the outage, in addition to losing commercial clients.
He told Reuters that "vital tracking data stored in servers and used by law enforcement to monitor illegal internet activity" was impacted by the fire.
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