A devastating fire at a data centre in New Delhi has left businesses scrambling after the facility, jointly operated by Singapore’s ST Telemedia and India’s Tata Communications, suffered what officials are calling “extensive damage.”
Tata Communications notified Indian stock exchanges on June 5 that it had activated emergency business continuity measures following an early morning blaze at the STT Global Data Centres India location. A letter dated June 15, obtained by Reuters, reveals the full scale of the destruction.
Television footage captured from inside the building on the day of the fire showed server racks and electrical equipment that appeared to be completely destroyed, with ceiling panels caved in and debris scattered across the floor.
Tata Communications subsidiary Novamesh wrote to one of its clients that the fire was “so severe that it caused extensive damage” to portions of the facility and disrupted services. The letter went on to say, “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.”
Neither Tata Communications nor ST Telemedia responded to requests for comment from Reuters.
Delhi fire authorities indicated the blaze originated in lithium battery units, though the exact cause has not been determined.
One affected client, Indian company Matrix Cellular — which sells international SIM cards — says it may have lost more than two decades of records. CEO Gaurav Khanna told Reuters, “Matrix has potentially lost access to over 20 years of accumulated operational and business data stored in the affected Tata data centre.” He added, “It’s been 20 days and they have not restored backup. If there is a backup it should have been restored by now.” Matrix says it also lost customer records, usage history, support logs, and billing and vendor data, and that sales have dropped sharply as a result of the outage.
A second affected business, Indian internet service provider R2 Net, is facing an estimated $2 million in losses along with the departure of commercial clients. Its CEO, Sanjay Singh, told Reuters the fire also damaged “vital tracking data stored in servers and used by law enforcement to monitor illegal internet activity.”
A representative of STT Global Data Centres India told R2 Net in a June 23 email — also reviewed by Reuters — that the company was conducting “detailed assessments and commissioned independent technical root cause analysis” of the incident, with results expected within five to seven weeks.
Google Cloud’s intermittent network problems in India have also been linked to the same fire, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter. On June 9, Google posted on its incidents page that “a fire at a third-party data center facility required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment,” without identifying the facility by name. In its most recent update on June 23, Google said no workaround was available yet and cautioned customers to expect potential latency issues until the site is fully restored. Google did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
Tata Communications describes itself as serving 300 of the Fortune 500 companies and says it connects businesses to 80% of the world’s largest cloud providers.
The joint venture between ST Telemedia and Tata Communications dates back to 2016, when ST Telemedia purchased a 74% stake in Tata Communications’ data centre operations. Together, they now manage 30 data centres across 10 cities in India.
The fire compounds recent difficulties for the broader Tata group. Tata Electronics recently experienced a cybersecurity incident in which a ransomware website posted what it claimed were documents belonging to clients Apple and Tesla on the dark web.
In its letter to Matrix Cellular, Novamesh described the fire as “clearly an unfortunate force majeure event,” saying that “services under the agreements at the data Centre facility have been hindered” and that “the position continues to be assessed.” The joint venture’s website had previously touted the facility as having a “state-of-the-art fire protection and suppression system.”
