What Happens When a Data Center Fire Disrupts Global Cloud Services?

1. Fire caused by lithium‑battery explosion, lasting over 30 hours

On the morning of September 10, a fire broke out at Alibaba Cloud's Singapore C‑zone data centre after a lithium‑battery exploded, persisting for more than 36 hours. The incident disabled key cloud services such as Redis, MongoDB, RDS MySQL, OSS, OTS, and MaxCompute.

Alibaba Cloud reported that most network‑affected services have been restored, but some remain offline pending physical recovery of the facility. Firefighters were still on site handling safety risks, and an emergency team prepared a server‑migration recovery plan.

The outage also impacted other technology firms hosted in the same facility, including Lazada and TikTok Shop, which experienced order‑sync failures and disrupted shopping‑cart functionality. Additional providers such as Digital Ocean, Coolify, and Cloudflare reported downtime or degraded service.

The fire highlighted the difficulty of extinguishing lithium‑battery fires. Water can cause short‑circuits and exacerbate the blaze, while perfluorohexane (PFH) proved effective by rapidly vaporising, absorbing heat, and displacing oxygen.

2. Data centre fires are frequent

Data centres are critical infrastructure, and recent years have seen several major fires. In August 2022, a Google data centre in Iowa suffered an explosion, affecting millions of users. In October 2022, a fire at SK C&C’s Korean data centre destroyed five battery racks, causing widespread service disruption.

France’s OVH experienced a UPS‑induced fire in March 2021, taking down multiple data centres and affecting millions of websites and game servers, leading to lawsuits and criticism of inadequate fire safety measures.