After Horrible Fire Destroyed Servers, Here's How Rust Developer Got The Game Back Online

The popular survival game Rust suffered a setback this week when the game's data center in Strasbourg, France caught on fire, bringing the servers down and wiping data. Producer Alistair McFarlane has spoken to PC Gamer about the situation and how the team was able to get the servers back up and running in short order.

McFarlane said when he woke up at 7 AM, his phone was already overrun with messages about the fire that took place overnight. McFarlane said he didn't imagine it would be such a bad situation because "data centers these days are built to high standards with advanced fire suppression systems." Even so, the fire ripped through the data center and crashed Rust's EU servers.

Thankfully, no one was injured, but it took hours for firefighters to put out the blaze.

"I was utterly shocked when I saw the pictures on Twitter of the building fully engulfed on fire," McFarlane said. "It was clear we needed a plan to get the affected servers back online and communicate to our players."

It was decided to bring new servers back online at OVH's Poland data center, but McFarlane said this was not ideal because it's about 1,000 kilometers from Strasbourg. This meant a less-than-optimal experience for EU players, but the developer said it was the best it could source with the quantity it needed in such a short amount of time.

The servers were back online within about 11 hours of them first going down. However, while Facepunch had backups for some data, player progression information was not backed up off-site. McFarlane said this was a lesson learned. "We need to ensure player progression data is backed up offsite, and we'll make sure this happens going forward," the developer said.

A cause of the fire has not been established at this juncture. It wasn't just Rust's servers that were affected, of course, as Reuters reports that "millions" of French websites went dark due to the outage. OVH is Europe's largest cloud services company.

Rust has enjoyed a new lease on life recently after Twitch streamers began to play it again, giving the game overall a big boost. The console edition of the game for PS4 and Xbox One finally now has a release window: Spring 2021.

Huge streamers like Pokimane and Shroud helped to reignite interest in Rust in early January. It became one of the most-watched