Alibaba Cloud lost a whole zone to a lithium battery in its landlord's data centre

On 10 September 2024 a fire broke out at the Digital Realty SIN11 data centre at 3 Loyang Way in Singapore, triggered by a lithium-ion battery that exploded on the third floor of the four-storey building. About twenty people were evacuated and no injuries were reported.

SIN11's most prominent tenant was Alibaba Cloud, which ran its Singapore availability zone C there. The company detected a network-access anomaly in the zone at 10:20 a.m. Beijing time and began moving traffic away, switching most network and security products to other zones by 10:55 a.m.

Recovery was limited because engineers could not enter the building. By midday the high-availability versions of RDS, OSS, OTS and MaxCompute had recovered, but at 8:04 p.m. the fire alarm had not fully cleared and Alibaba warned of a risk of a complete AZ C network outage.

Digital Realty shut off part of the site's electrical systems at 1:45 a.m. on 11 September, and on 12 September Singapore's Building and Construction Authority found minor structural damage and issued a dangerous-building order and a closure order for parts of the facility. Tenants including ByteDance and Lazada were significantly disrupted.