Following a fire that broke out at OVHcloud’s data centres, popular survival game Rust lost player data from its EU servers.
The fire broke out on Wednesday at midnight at one of OVHcloud’s data centres located in Strasbourg, France. OVHCloud is Europe’s largest hosting provider and as reported by Reuters, the fire affected banks, shops, news websites, and government agencies’ portals. Facepunch Studios, the independent developer behind Rust, had to share the difficult news that they were also affected by the data centre fires. The studio took to Twitter to write that due to the fire they were “expecting a large amount of data loss across the affected servers.” Later updating that they have “confirmed a total loss of the affected EU servers” and the data lost “will be unable to be restored.” Facepunch Studio later clarifies that “data lost” as “only player progression” on the 25 EU servers affected.
The CEO of OVHcloud, Octave Klaba, wrote that “Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire”. Octave shared that no one was harmed in the incident. When asked about their fire safety protocols by Reuter, OVHcloud declined to comment. As of now, Facepunch studios has begun to bring EU servers back online but of course, all player progress has been reset. Many disgruntled fans spoke out in frustration that the studio did not have offsite back-ups in case of such events.
Rust released in 2013 but has seen a resurgence after popular Twitch streamers like Pokimane, and Myth began to stream the multiplayer survival game. Due to the recent surge in popularity the game is finally getting a console release expected to arrive in spring 2021. It will be arriving on PS4 and Xbox One consoles. Though there is no word on current-gen versions, Rust will be able to play on those systems via backward compatibility.
