Massive Fire at Datacentre in Almere, NL-Alert Circulated - DutchNews.nl
All personnel were evacuated as firefighters contained the blaze, while NorthC said the cause and extent of damage were still unknown.
- On Thursday morning, a major fire broke out at the NorthC Datacenters facility in Almere, prompting emergency services to classify the incident as GRIP 1 within 40 minutes and triggering an NL-Alert across Flevoland due to dense smoke.
- NorthC, a colocation provider operating 25 data centers across Europe, runs the Almere site to Tier 3+ standards, though the cause of the fire remains unidentified and firefighters worked to cool an on-site diesel tank.
- The outage disabled the emergency communication system for Transdev buses across Utrecht province because critical servers lacked backup, while also knocking Utrecht University offline and disrupting billing processes for healthcare provider Infomedics.
- NorthC chief executive Alexandra Schless confirmed all personnel were evacuated safely, yet the incident exposed a critical vulnerability: control center servers had not been migrated to redundant backup, leaving public transport emergency systems non-functional.
- Between 2014 and 2023, at least 22 significant data center fire or explosion events occurred globally, underscoring the physical fragility of digital systems despite the Netherlands investing more than 200 million euros in AI infrastructure.
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The fire broke out Thursday morning in the technical room of the NorthC Datacenter; extinguishing it could take hours. Statistics Netherlands is also experiencing an outage due to the fire.
In addition to Utrecht University (UU), Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and transport company Transdev also reported on Thursday afternoon that they are feeling the effects of a major fire at a data center in Almere on Thursday.
NorthC data centre fire in Almere knocks Utrecht University offline and disables public transport emergency system across Utrecht province
A fire at NorthC's Almere data centre triggered an NL-Alert, knocked Utrecht University offline, and disabled emergency communications for public transport across Utrecht province.
A major fire broke out at a NorthC data center in Almere on Thursday. The safety region has sent an NL-Alert to local residents....
A fire at a data center of the company NorthC in Almere has caused problems at Utrecht University, the public transport company Transdev in Utrecht, and the national Chambers of Commerce.
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