Zenith Bank hit by outage due to data center fire

An outage at Nigeria’s biggest bank has been blamed on a fire at the company’s data center.

Local publication TechCabal reports that Zenith Bank’s backup power system caught fire, triggering a power cut to the data center.

The outage began at 7 am and has impacted millions of customers, with most of the bank’s services offline.

TechCabal reports that while the bank has a disaster recovery data center, it was not running in an active-active deployment. Services are now being switched over manually, with the company hoping to return online later today.

The bank did not immediately respond to DCD’s requests for comment – we will update this story as we learn more.

The outage comes just a week after a fire at a Global Switch data center in Paris, which was caused by a water leak in the battery room. That fire came a month after another data center in France burned down, and an Australian fire at a data center brought down a hospital patient records system.

In South Korea, a lithium-ion battery fire was to blame for a KakaoTalk outage that caused chaos in the country, while a power room issue caused a small fire at an Equinix data center.

The industry’s most notable fire occurred in 2021 when OVHcloud’s Strasbourg data center burned to the ground.