On Thursday 21 March 2024 we experienced one of the most incredible days since MYETV went online; our “datadock” data center in Strasbourg was completely evacuated due to the start of a fire caused by a water leak in the battery room which then also caused the leak of gaseous substances potentially lethal for humans. The local authorities intervened immediately and turned off the electricity in the entire building and averted worse damage by extinguishing the small fires that formed. All this also caused an interruption in communication among the employees in the data center who were no longer able to accessAccess [the simple access to a website as a visitor] the building for approximately 36 hours; during these initial 36 hours we had no official communication about what had happened and we started to get seriously worried; until the afternoon of March 22nd we received the first communication of an electricity outage caused by a water leak. Given the gravity of the situation, on the night between Friday 22 March and Saturday 23 March we therefore decided to divert our DNS to another data center in Mumbai, India; in less than 12 hours MYETV was online again, albeit with some limitations. In the meantime, the Strasbourg technicians were allowed to return to the building on March 22, 2024 but the situation was reportedly very complicated: the authorities had imposed a shutdown of the data center and would not turn the electricity back on without first replacing everyone damaged cables, devices and batteries; at the first reconstruction they reassured us that our servers with all the data were safe and had not suffered any damage. Over the weekend, the data center technicians immediately worked to order cables, batteries and devices to be replaced and on Monday 25 March they were able to get to work to restore the power; the power was restored yesterday Tuesday 26 March so all the servers involved were also back online.
During the night between March 26th and 27th we worked hard to transfer all the remaining data to the new datacenter, awaiting further information. This morning, thanks to the various transfers carried out, everything returned to normal and the contents-[Contents]: [every content intended as text, images, audio or video] are accessible again as we left them a week ago.
Today we are, therefore, online via a new route that starts from India; we still have to evaluate what we will do with the European data center in Strasbourg, we also have a new all-Italian option in the near future7, we are evaluating whether to bring part of the infrastructure to Italy and temporarily leave part of it in India until we transfer everything.
It is important to underline that all the data present is encrypted thanks to the latest modern techniques that we have implemented, they cannot be read or modified by anyone, and all transfers were carried out on networks protected by security certificates with password-protected compressed files and encrypted with AES256 and behind the protection of perimeter firewalls appropriately configured for the transfer of the same.
We therefore want to dedicate our last words to the employees of the Strasbourg data center by thanking them for their work over the last 10 years and for what they have done to bring everything back online as soon as possible; We understand very well the difficulty of these last few days, the important thing is that you are all well. We understand very well the difficulties of these moments. We thank you infinitely and wish you the best.
Goodbye, France.
Arrivederci, France.
