New Delhi data centre fire leaves customers fearing lost records

Burnt server racks, damaged electrical equipment, collapsed ceiling panels and debris covered the floor inside Next-Gen Tower in Greater Kailash-1, New Delhi, after a June 5 fire in a leased data-centre space. Tata Communications activated business continuity protocols on June 5 after the early-morning blaze at Next-Gen Tower. Firefighters brought it under control without any loss of life.

The site is part of STT Global Data Centres India, the joint venture owned by Singapore’s ST Telemedia and Tata Communications. Tata Communications’ initial assessment showed the damage was limited to a single data hall and associated infrastructure, while the rest of the facility continued operating. Footage from inside the building showed burnt server racks, damaged electrical equipment, collapsed ceiling panels and debris across the floor.

Delhi fire authorities identified lithium battery units as the origin of the blaze, although the exact cause remained unclear. On June 15, Tata Communications unit Novamesh said the incident had caused severe damage and made recovery of affected data and systems significantly more difficult, and called it a force majeure event.

Matrix Cellular lost access to more than two decades of accumulated operational and business data. Gaurav Khanna, the company’s chief executive, said backups had not been restored after 20 days. The company said the missing records included customer data, usage records, support history, and billing and vendor-related files, and that sales had fallen sharply because of the outage. Another client, the internet service provider R2 Net, estimated losses of about $2 million and said it faced the loss of commercial customers.

Google’s Service Health page listed an incident beginning on June 5, 2026, affecting traffic from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and surrounding areas with intermittent elevated latency and possible packet loss. Google said the fire at a third-party data centre required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment, isolating a non-compute local point of presence in Delhi and reducing available network capacity. Google later said it had rerouted significant traffic, but that no workaround was initially available.

The company says 300 of the Fortune 500 are among its customers and that it connects businesses to 80% of the world’s cloud giants. ST Telemedia bought a 74% stake in Tata Communications’ data-centre business in 2016, and the joint venture now runs 30 data centres in 10 Indian cities.