Rust EU Servers Begin To Come Back Online Following Fire At French Datacenter

It's been a wild 24 hours or so for the developers behind Rust – Facepunch Studios – and the game's European playerbase. Yesterday, Facepunch Studios published a post to Twitter in which it said it was aware that a number of its EU servers were down, telling us that the datacenter those servers are hosted at was looking into the issue. It turns out this was more than a mere outage, as the servers were down because of a fire at that datacenter.

The fire happened at one of the four Strasbourg, France-based datacenters owned by OVH Cloud. According to a statement from OVH Cloud, the fire destroyed its SBG2 datacenter, but luckily, no one was hurt in the blaze. However, that fire brought down 25 different Rust servers in the EU, with Facepunch saying that it was expecting a "large amount of data loss," and that the lost data wouldn't be able to be restored.

Update:
We've confirmed a total loss of the affected EU servers during the OVH data centre fire. We're now exploring replacing the affected servers.

Data will be unable to be restored.

— Rust (@playrust) March 10, 2021

As the day went on, Facepunch has been slowly bringing those affected servers back online. In a series of tweets, the company has been announcing new batches of servers which are now online, but unfortunately, the company wasn't able to restore the data it expected to lose.

In a follow-up tweet, Facepunch clarified what it meant when it was talking about lost data in earlier tweets. "For clarity: When we referred to 'data' in prior Tweets today the data lost in question was only player progression on 25 servers." That's a bit of good news in that the entire server wasn't wiped, but still, players are going to have to start over when it comes to progression with their characters.

For clarity: When we referred to "data" in prior Tweets today the data lost in question was only player progression on 25 servers.

— Rust (@playrust) March 10, 2021

Still, it sounds like this fire could have been a whole lot worse, so it's good news indeed that the only thing that was lost was the stuff stored in that datacenter. If you're an EU Rust player, you might want to check the official Rust Twitter account to see if your server was affected and whether or not it's now back online.