A fire at a datacentre in Almere has been brought under control, but outages have forced Utrecht University to close on Friday and disrupted GP practices, pharmacies and a number of other large organisations across the Netherlands.

The fire at NorthC Datacenters’ site on the Sallandsekant industrial estate broke out on Thursday morning in a utility room at the rear of the building, where the emergency power supply, cooling systems and diesel-fuelled backup generators are housed.

The Flevoland safety region declared the fire under control at around 9 pm that evening and downgraded the incident to a routine call overnight.

NorthC chief executive Alexandra Schless told broadcaster NOS no servers or storage units had caught fire, but the company shut off power to the data halls on the fire brigade’s instructions. Customer systems running at the site are therefore offline, even though the equipment itself is intact.

Outages

Utrecht University announced on Thursday evening that it would close on Friday because the disruption affected its access-pass system, leaving staff and students unable to enter buildings safely. The university website, online learning platforms and the student information system Osiris – used for submitting theses and internship reports – were also down.

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and transport operator Transdev have reported outages, as have several GP practices and pharmacies across the country. Medical billing service Infomedics is unreachable by phone or chat.

Jaap Wynia, an Amsterdam GP, told NOS his practice could not access patient records, scheduled appointments or phone numbers and had set up an emergency line.

Damage and recovery

NorthC said in an overnight update that experts were on site assessing the damage and that work had begun on a temporary power supply. The company has not given a restoration timeline.

Stijn Grove, director of the Dutch Data Center Association (DDCA), told regional broadcaster Omroep Flevoland that a fire of this scale was unprecedented in the Netherlands. The Almere site has a floor area of 26,000 square metres and an 11-megawatt power connection – equivalent to the consumption of about 11,000 households.

Multiple NL-alert emergency warnings were issued on Thursday telling residents around the site to keep windows and doors closed and switch off ventilation systems because of widespread smoke. The cause of the fire is not yet known.