Fire at Tata-STT Data Centre Threatens 20 Yrs of Matrix Cellular Data, Disrupts Google Cloud

A fire that broke out at a data centre jointly owned by Singapore's ST Telemedia and Tata Communications in New Delhi's Greater Kailash on June 5 caused extensive damage to parts of the facility, making data recovery difficult for several clients, according to a letter from Tata Communications unit Novamesh reviewed by Reuters.

Tata Communications had informed stock exchanges on the same day that it had activated business continuity protocols to minimise disruptions following the early morning fire at the facility.

Delhi fire authorities said the fire occurred in lithium battery units, though the cause has not been conclusively established. Ten fire tenders were deployed and the firefighting operation lasted several hours, The Hindu had earlier reported. Two firefighters were injured and the damage was eventually confined to the third floor of the building, the publication added.

Client Losses

One of the worst-affected clients is Matrix Cellular, an Indian company that provides international SIM cards. Matrix CEO Gaurav Khanna told Reuters that the company may have lost access to over 20 years of accumulated operational and business data stored at the facility.

"It's been 20 days and they have not restored backup. If there is a backup it should have been restored by now," Khanna said, as quoted by the news agency. Matrix said it lost customer data, usage records, support history, and billing and vendor-related data in the fire. The company said its sales have fallen sharply due to disruptions caused by the outage.

In a June 15 letter to Matrix Cellular reviewed by Reuters, Tata Communications unit Novamesh said the fire was "so severe that it caused extensive damage" to parts of the facility. "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," the letter said.

Novamesh described the incident as "an unfortunate force majeure event" and said services at the facility "have been hindered." It added that "the position continues to be assessed."

Another affected client, Indian internet service provider R2 Net, faces an estimated loss of $2 million and the loss of commercial clients from the disruption, its CEO Sanjay Singh told Reuters. Singh said the fire also affected vital tracking data stored in servers and used by law enforcement to monitor illegal internet activity.

Google Disruptions

Some of Google Cloud's intermittent network disruptions in India also relate to the incident, the news agency said. On June 9, Google said on its incidents page that "a fire at a third-party data center facility required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment," without naming Tata. Reuters cited a source who said that Google's updates were related to the same STT-Tata site. In its last update on June 23, Google said there was no workaround yet and warned customers they could face latency issues until the facility was fully restored.

According to the report by The Hindu, hundreds of crores of rupees in equipment, data and revenue losses may have resulted from the fire, with traffic from Google, Netflix and multiple local internet service providers in the National Capital Region affected.

A representative of STT Global Data Centres India told R2 Net in a June 23 email, also reviewed by Reuters, that it was conducting detailed assessments and had commissioned an independent technical root cause analysis of the incident, expected to be completed in five to seven weeks.

The data centre's website states it has a "state-of-the-art fire protection and suppression system." Tata Communications, which says 300 of the Fortune 500 companies are its customers, connects businesses to 80% of the world's cloud giants, according to the company's website.