A data center fire in Delhi could have destroyed equipment worth hundreds of millions of crowns

Hundreds of crores of rupees in equipment, data and revenue loss may have been caused by a fire at a data center in Delhi’s Greater Kailash on Friday (June 5, 2026), affecting traffic from Google, Netflix and several local ISPs in the National Capital Region, companies affected by the fire told The Hindu.

Although no loss of life was reported, key network routers and servers belonging to local providers and large technology companies were damaged.

Fires in data centers where multiple companies bring their own equipment for “co-location” are rare. Industry best practices typically require fire extinguishing equipment using inert gas systems, and data centers typically have limited human presence on site during their day-to-day operations. However, these safeguards may not have been enough at the ST Telemedia GDC facility, which operated out of a building owned by Tata Communications Ltd. STT GDC has “leased premises,” Tata Communications said in a stock exchange filing on Friday.

Blaze is spreading

At least two local networks that Hind spoke to were cut off around 2:30 a.m. The Delhi Fire Department said it received the first call about the fire on the third floor of the building at 2:45 a.m., adding that it reached the scene at 2:49 a.m. he said.

“At around 2.30am, we got a call from our team that the network was completely down,” said Sanjay Singh of R2 Net, a local internet provider. Another ISP said its network went down around the same time. “Normally they use some kind of gas to put out fires, but the stock they had was not enough,” claimed Mr Singh.

STT GDC, which is in the process of being acquired by investment firm KKR and Singaporean telecom operator Singtel, said in a statement to The Hindu that “Delhi Fire Service personnel were on the scene at approximately 02:45 hours”.

“Based on our preliminary assessment, the primary impact is limited to customers in one data hall,” an STT GDC spokesperson said. “The incident remains under investigation and it would be premature to comment on the cause at this stage.”

Video footage shared by one client and reviewed by The Hindu showed the equipment in the server room completely blackened and charred as three fire tenders were seen outside the building. A total of ten tenders were deployed and the firefighting effort lasted several hours, although the damage was eventually limited to the third floor. Two firefighters were injured in the attack. A local police officer said that prima facie it appeared that the fire was caused by a short circuit.

Data loss

“There are about 200 racks of servers on one floor,” Mr. Singh said, adding, “Fifty of those racks belonged to Google. They have an independent cage on the left side of the third floor. (Google did not respond to a request for comment) We are a small operator, but we lost equipment worth ₹2 million.” While Netflix also had data center infrastructure, its Open Connect architecture could insulate it from shocks because caches are deployed directly on the local networks of many ISPs.

Raunak Maheshwari, head of Megaport Ltd, which runs Internet exchanges for content and device service providers, said the losses extended to data that could be irreplaceable. His own accounting software vendor kept its data servers on the third floor, he said.

Asked about an estimate that the losses could be at least around ₹ 500 crore, Mr. Maheshwari said the losses on the plant alone could run into hundreds of crores, given the size of the plant. “Data cost, who knows?” he said. STT GDC declined to comment on the commercial value of the damaged equipment, but said some customers’ servers had been safely migrated.

One ISP said it was able to restore service on June 8 after rerouting traffic through facilities on other floors. Another said that because both his primary and backup devices were located in the same rack, he was forced to route data through the lower-bandwidth backup device, impacting the user experience.

The impact could also spread to other Internet users. Anurag Bhatia, a network expert who blogs about India’s internet infrastructure, said Google accounts for up to half of the traffic of a typical internet user in India. “The Google outage had a very big (impact) and extended to networks that weren’t even in that data center,” Mr Bhatia said.

Shailendra Parmar, chief technology officer at Hybrid Internet, which works with ISPs in northeastern India, posted a chart on X showing that much of Google’s traffic jumped from cheaper private peering agreements on the morning of June 5 to more expensive “transit” connections used for other parts of the Internet.

ISPs said they had heard little from STT since the fire was first reported. One service provider said that much of the information they were able to glean about the incident came from employees on site, where access is restricted even to the exterior of the building.

“We are working closely with affected customers to assess the specific impacts and provide appropriate support, including business continuity planning and relocation arrangements,” STT said, declining to comment on “individual customer deployments or configurations.

(With inputs from Shrimansi Kaushik.)

Published – 10 Jun 2026 06:50 IST