Rust loses ‘large amounts of player data’ after servers are destroyed by fire

A “large amount of data” for online survival game Rust has been destroyed after a data centre was destroyed by fire in France.

The game’s official Twitter account first tweeted about the incident early this morning, simply stating that it was aware some of the EU servers were down and technicians at the data centre were investigating.

It soon emerged that the issue was a major fire at the OVHcloud data centre in Strasbourg, which broke out at around midnight (CEST) and took six hours to bring under control.

According to Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, a large number of French websites have also gone offline as a result of the fire, which completely destroyed one of the five-storey, 500 sq m data centres on the site and seriously damaged another.

As news of the fire became clear, the Rust Twitter account updated its players on the situation, informing them that it was “expecting a large amount of data loss across the affected servers”.

A few hours later, it confirmed that the data was gone, stating: “We’ve confirmed a total loss of the affected EU servers during the OVH data centre fire. We’re now exploring replacing the affected servers. Data will be unable to be restored.”

It’s not yet clear how this will affect European players once the servers are replaced, but it’s likely that if no backups were created then some progress may have been lost.

After releasing in early access in December 2013, Rust finally received its full release in February 2018, but has continued to receive regular updates from its developer Facepunch Studios (also known for its sandbox game Garry’s Mod).

In November 2019 it was announced that Rust would be coming to PS4 and Xbox One in 2019. This has since been delayed to 2021, though no solid date has been confirmed.