Server Fire Wipes Days Of Rust Player Progression

Yesterday, we reported on the data centre in Russia that caught fire. While it may or may not have disrupted Google’s services, Rust, the video game, was a confirmed victim. At least, its players are, as days of progression were lost for some of them. Now, Rust producer Alistair McFarlane has shared a little bit on what transpired on his side of things.

PC Gamer reports that the Strasbourgh data center that caught fire hosted the Rust servers for the EU. 24 of the servers that went down held almost 10000 players each during peak hours. While it’s fair to say that the fire didn’t happen at such hours, a lot of players would have been inconvenienced by the time morning came.

Even the process of identifying affected servers was not easy. The process involved fighting for traffic with other people trying to log in to find information. And then came the issue of finding replacements. Ultimately, McFarlane had to settle for OVH Poland, which was about 1000km away from Strasbourg. The Facepunch team will be moving servers again in the coming weeks.

And while Rust had local and off-site backups, the latter did not involve player progression. The result was the aforementioned days of progress going up in flames, quite literally. But for what it’s worth, McFarlane said “lesson learnt”, pledging to have off-site player progression backups in the future.

Google Denies Service Downtime Caused By Data Centre Fire In France; Russian Authorities Disagree

Google and Russia have provided conflicting reasons to why Google and YouTube services were briefly disrupted in the country, the BBC reported. The Russian government blamed a fire at cloud provider OVH data centres in Strasbourg, France. But Google disputes this.

Instead, the tech giant attributed the downtime to a router misconfiguration at a local third-party internet service provider.

“Following extensive investigation we have no evidence to indicate that the fire in OVHCloud’s data centre, or Google’s own infrastructure, was the root cause of this incident,” Google said, according to the BBC.

In contrast, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulating authority, pointed fingers at the fire and said the service disruptions were “not connected to the agency’s actions on restriction of speed of access to the Twitter social platform”.

Roskomnadzor had recently slowed down the speed of Twitter in the country, claiming the platform failed to remove 3,000 posts related to suicide, drugs, and pornography. The authority said the move was aimed at protecting Russian citizens.

Incredibly popular in Russia, Twitter is frequently used by government opponents like Alexei Navalny, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

OVH, which operates the affected data centre, boasts 1.6 million customers across 140 countries. But Google services in Russia are not believed to be routed through OVH, the BBC said.

The fire does have one confirmed victim – the multiplayer video game Rust. The game’s developers tweeted that some player progression data was gone for good.