Maybe I’m not seeing the right headlines but until this week I can’t remember hearing about a datacenter complex catching fire or suffering losses from any other type of disaster. Surely there are some server centers that have been wiped out during floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters but the focus in those situations is rightly on the human losses with data processing coming back online over time. That’s why I was honestly shocked to hear about the OVH Datacenter in Strasbourg, catching fire late on March 9th and the ensuing news from Rust developer Facepunch that 25 European servers for the game were lost.
“It’s a good reminder that even before we start worrying about a game being shut down, our entire virtual lives spent in them could be wiped out or reset at a moment’s notice.”
Me
Thankfully no one was injured in the fire and Facepunch later clarified that the data that was lost was “only player progression” and not entire private server worlds. Definitely not a “crisis averted” situation but also not as catastrophic as their initial tweets suggested. Nevertheless, it’s a good reminder that even before we start worrying about a game being shut down, our entire virtual lives spent in them could be wiped out or reset at a moment’s notice. I’m not trying to say ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter matchmaking‘ or that we should refuse online games altogether. It just reiterated the frailty of what we put into our modern online games.