A substantial portion of Alibaba Cloud’s services was disrupted after a fire broke out at a Digital Realty datacenter in Singapore on September 10, 2024. The incident, which occurred early Tuesday morning, is suspected to have been caused by a lithium-ion battery explosion in the facility’s battery room.
Reports indicate that the Singapore Civil Defence Force swiftly responded to the blaze, which triggered the fire alarm at the SIN11 datacenter at 07:45 local time. Fortunately, all personnel were safely evacuated by 08:15, with no injuries reported.
Alibaba Cloud, a major cloud service provider in the region, began noticing irregularities in its Singapore-based Availability Zone C around 10:20 SGT. The company later confirmed that the explosion and ensuing fire resulted in abnormally high temperatures in affected areas, leading to service disruptions.
Despite the severity of the situation, Alibaba Cloud’s disaster recovery protocols were successfully activated, and failover mechanisms functioned as intended. This ensured that its high-availability cloud products continued operating within agreed service levels, though some users had to manually migrate their workloads to maintain service continuity.
As the incident unfolded, certain services were temporarily taken offline due to the elevated temperatures within the datacenter. By 20:04 SGT on Tuesday, the situation remained unresolved, with staff unable to re-enter the fire-damaged building.
Further complications arose early Wednesday morning at 01:46 SGT, when water leaks, likely resulting from firefighting efforts, created a new risk of electrical short circuits. This necessitated an emergency shutdown of electrical systems in one of the buildings.
Digital Realty confirmed that portions of the facility were powered down at 01:45 SGT on Wednesday to prevent further damage. In the meantime, Alibaba Cloud worked to restore network services in unaffected areas of the complex.
The fire not only disrupted Alibaba Cloud’s operations but also impacted other platforms reliant on the same infrastructure. Companies like Digital Ocean, IaaS provider Coolify, and content delivery network Cloudflare reported service outages and performance degradation, according to online user complaints.
This incident highlights the ongoing concerns surrounding lithium-ion battery safety in critical infrastructure such as datacenters. A similar incident occurred in 2021 when French cloud provider OVH lost one of its datacenters due to a fire in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system.
