On March 10th 2021, 3.6 million websites were suddenly offline, including the French government portal – what had happened? For as of yet unknown reasons one of cloud provider OHV's 5-story server buildings burned down completely while a second building was severely damaged. The incident led to the destruction of 12.000 servers and to the sites hosted on the servers becoming unavailable.

Beyond the servers, the company's hosted private cloud service, which had stored data from many big private corporations had also fallen victim to the destruction. Shortly after the blaze, the video game company FacePunch was forced to announce that all its data for the popular online game "Rust" had been lost, since FacePunch had no local backup.

This story illustrates that cloud solutions can only be one part of an effective backup strategy. Following the 3-2-1 rule, at least two other local copies should always be made to avoid complete data loss like in this ScaryTale.