A mid-day fire at a Samsung data center in Gwacheon, South Korea was responsible for temporarily taking a number of the company’s services and websites offline on Sunday. Fortunately, there aren’t any reports of fatalities and it seems that Samsung was able to get the affected services back online within hours.
The fire reportedly broke out on the fourth floor of a building that houses Samsung’s backup data center for its primary data center in Suwon, South Korea. The company acknowledged the blaze on its ICT Story website (in Korean) and apologized for the downtime although no plans were mentioned on how to prevent similar issues in the future.
Virtually every device that needs to connect to a Samsung server, whether for total operation or just to power a few features, was impacted. Some even reported that non-Samsung apps on their Smart TVs weren’t working during the downtime. Even Samsung’s main website was knocked offline by the fire.
It’s unclear how an incident at a backup data center could have such an impact on the company’s services around the globe. What’s more, one has to wonder why so many services all seemingly rely on a single point of operation.
Did you notice any of your Samsung services going down on Sunday morning? If so, which services were affected and for how long? Let us know in the comments section below.
