If you received a lot of error messages on your Samsung phone, tablet or Smart TV over the weekend, it wasn’t a glitch. A fire at one of Samsung’s data centers caused Samsung.com to go down and rendered a lot of Samsung services unusable for most customers worldwide. Samsung SDS confirmed the fire in a blog post and mentioned that services were down from 06:00 to 10:30 (GMT) on the 20th. The blog post mentioned that all services were back online as of 10:30 GMT, and that there were no fatalities in the fire.
The fire originated in the fourth floor of the Samsung SDS building, which is located in Gwacheon, South Korea. The floor housed a data center that hosted Samsung’s credit card services, which were down as a result. Several users also mentioned that Samsung’s Smart Hub was inaccessible. It is unclear as to why a fire at a single location managed to knock off Samsung’s global website along with most of its services, considering that the data center in Gwacheon isn’t even the primary data center.
Take a look at the building engulfed in fire below:
