Updated at 2:02pm BST on 11 May 2026 with information about possible impact on Brittany Ferries, KVK, Flevo Hospital, and Transdev and updated details on the fire and recovery from NorthC and IBM.

A 12-hour fire at a data centre near Amsterdam has knocked out online operations for businesses in the Netherlands and beyond, with IBM one of those affected.

Data centre company NorthC confirmed a fire began at its data centre site in Almere, Netherlands at 08:45 on Thursday morning, with emergency services battling to control it until 20:50 the same day.

By Friday 8 May, NorthC said the local fire department had scaled down its operations, and the company’s experts were on site to assess the damage. Nobody was harmed during the incident.

While no servers or data carriers were reported damaged in the fire, which appears to have been limited to the rear of the building, NorthC told public broadcaster NOS it had turned off the power supply after orders from emergency services.

According to the local fire department, five fire engines, eight other vehicles, a firefighting robot, and a drone team all attended the site in Almere to assist.

In an update shared on Monday 11 May, NorthC said it had expected to switch on its redundant power supply at the site by Wednesday 13 May at noon, despite previously providing a 72 hour timeline for recovery on 8 May.

It explained the recovery included installing multiple generators, UPS systems, distribution panels, and pulling over 1km of cable. The delay in installing the equipment was blamed on NorthC waiting for the delivery of a "critical component for the redundant structure."

IBM Cloud down

IBM confirmed to the media that it was one of those affected, after numerous reports online that its Amsterdam 03 region was down.

It told The Register: “IBM is aware of a fire at a datacenter in Amsterdam which serves IBM, in addition to others… We are working closely with emergency services, addressing the effect on our operations, and coordinating directly with affected clients to address any impacts.”

As of the morning of 11 May, IBM confirmed the data centre remained unavailable for the region, and recommended customers continue using their disaster recovery paths while repairs were underway.

The components and services affected included: data centre power infrastructure, block storage, cloud infrastructure, cloud load balancer, cloud object storage, cloudant, compute general, Db2, file storage for classic, IBM cloud backup for classic, infrastructure network operations, Kubernetes service, and VSI SAN.

Dutch businesses affected

The effects of the outage have also been felt throughout the Netherlands. The country’s national statistics bureau CBS is still experiencing outages at the time of writing.

Utrecht University closed the “vast majority” of buildings today after experiencing significant issues with its network, applications and website, and a local water board confirmed it had also seen outages connected to the fire.

The Dutch Chamber of Commerce (KVK) also reported a problem with its services on 7 May, but had resolved the issue by that afternoon. Transport company Transdev had also reported issues with its communication systems.

According to local media, multiple hospitals and GP practices in the country were also affected by outages, with Flevo Hospital in Almere confirming its systems partly ran through the NorthC site but that it had limited the effect of the outage.

Outside of the country, British-French ferry company Brittany Ferries also cited a "fire in an IBM data centre" as the reason it could not access its reservation system, meaning customers could not make or amend their bookings.

While the company does not reference the Almere site, and did not return The Stack's request for comment before publication, the IBM Cloud status page is not currently reporting any other outages.

One of 14 NorthC data centres in the Netherlands, the 26,000m2 Almere site is an 11MW data centre with a 6,870m2 data floor. It boasts of a chilled water redundant cooling system and a double knock, aspiration system for fire prevention.

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