A lithium-battery fire in one Tata data hall vaporised 20 years of a client's data

On 5 June 2026 an early-morning fire broke out in the lithium battery units of an STT Global Data Centres facility in New Delhi, a joint venture owned 74 percent by Singapore's ST Telemedia and 26 percent by Tata Communications. Tata told Indian stock exchanges that day that it had activated business continuity plans; the blaze caused extensive damage before it was contained.

The blast radius reached some of the world's biggest cloud customers. Google Cloud linked intermittent network disruptions in India to the fire, and said an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment was required. Domestic clients fared worse: Matrix Cellular, which sells international SIM cards, said it had potentially lost access to over 20 years of accumulated operational and business data, and that sales had fallen sharply; ISP R2 Net faced estimated losses of $2 million and the loss of customers.

The data was largely unrecoverable. Tata unit Novamesh told Matrix that the severity of the damage presented significant challenges to recovery, and called the event an 'unfortunate force majeure'; an independent root-cause analysis was expected to take five to seven weeks. The facility's own marketing claimed a 'state-of-the-art fire protection and suppression system'.

The case is a decision about where redundancy actually lives. STT runs 30 data centres in 10 Indian cities and connects businesses to 80 percent of the world's cloud giants, yet a single data hall held a client's entire operating history, and a fire in the battery units — the backup energy system itself — was not contained before the servers were destroyed.