Fire at Samsung Backup Data Center Takes Services Offline!

A fire at a Samsung datacenter in Gwacheon, South Korea temporarily knocked out access to Samsung.com this morning. That's not that big of a deal, except for that the fire also knocked out the connectivity of a number of Samsung devices: Samsung's Smart TV with SmartHub, Samsung phones, and Samsung Blu-ray players, to name a few.

Basically, any Samsung device that requires Samsung servers to operate — or uses Samsung servers for some selection of its features, like Samsung's "Apps Mobile" store — were rendered inoperable this morning as a result of the fire.

The good news is that service appears to be restored for most devices as of this article's writing. The fire itself, which took place on the building's fourth floor, didn't have any associated fatalities either. The fire affected the building that houses Samsung's backup data center for Samsung's primary datacenter in Suwon, South Korea.

The PCBs for the new flagship smartphones were damaged by the fire, just like manufacturing equipment, according to a media report.

The fire was first reported at around 7AM on Sunday, the 9th of March, 2014. Asia News Agency reports that it took approximately 280 firefighters about six hours to stop the fire at the fab. Numerous fire trucks, helicopters and other machines were used to cease the fire, which destroyed production and equipment worth about $1 billion (€721 million, £601 million). Around 15 people were evacuated from the factory, there are no reports about injuries of casualties.

Samsung posted an official notice about the incident to its ICT Story website — in Korean, we note. The company did apologize for the issue, though it's unclear just how a fire at the company's backup datacenter managed to so significantly affect Samsung's primary services.

Additionally, there's no indication that Samsung plans to alter how its services operate in order to prevent such an issue going forward. According to some reports, users were unable to access third-party apps on their Samsung Smart TVs, as the TVs allegedly seem to require a connection to Samsung's servers before non-Samsung apps can even be launched. As Twitter complaints indicated, it appeared to be a frustrating situation for some users:

"NOTHING on Samsung TV Smart Hub works today because Samsung's main website is down! Very poor show @samsunguk," wrote Twitter user @timtj early this morning.

CpG,