Generator Failure Causes Fire, Lengthy Data Center Outage

An emergency generator caught fire at a data center in Ogden, Utah over the Easter weekend, causing the full shutdown of the data center and lengthy outages for customers.

The incident at a WebNX facility comes a month after a more serious fire that destroyed an entire OVH data center in Strasbourg, France.

Dedicated server hosting firm WebNX says a backup generator experienced a ‘catastrophic failure’ Sunday afternoon, and fire officials opted to cut power to the entire building.

The company says a small number of servers may have suffered water damage as emergency crews battled the generator fire.

‘Sunday afternoon the city power was disrupted and, as designed, our backup generators automatically switched on,’ the company said. ‘However, during that transition, one of our backup generators that had been recently tested and benchmarked specifically for this situation experienced a catastrophic failure, caught fire, and as a result initiated the fire suppression protocol.