Computing firm OVHcloud experiences network outage ahead of IPO

By Richard Lough and LIVE22 Mathieu Rosemain

PARIS, Oct 13 (Reuters) – Cloud computing services provider OVHcloud said on Wednesday it was experiencing a network outage, just two days before it launches one of France’s biggest initial public offerings of the year.

The outage followed a “human error” during the reconfiguration of one of its data centres in the United States, founder and chairman Octave Klaba said on Twitter.

The data centre is located in Vint Hill, Virginia, the company said.

The network returned to normal at 0815 GMT after the intervention of OVHcloud teams, it said.

OVHcloud will seek to raise 350 million euros ($404 million) with its IPO, with a price range of 18.50-20 euros per share for the flotation valuing it at 3.5-3.74 billion euros.

Pricing is set for Thursday and its market debut on Friday.

Klaba said that the network reconfiguration was aimed at adding capacity to stem a hike in so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattacks.

“A wrong configuration of the router caused the network to fail,” Klaba said on his Twitter account.

OVHcloud is the second-biggest European-based cloud services provider after Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems, according to Synergy Research website

It is seen by some politicians as a potential alternative to U.S.

giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, which dominate the market.

However, the company has so far lacked the scale and financial clout to dent their market share.

Users took to Twitter on Wednesday to complain about the outage.

While some said their servers were back on, others chose irony, with one Twitter user posting a meme that read “Hello IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

This was the second major disruption for OVHcloud this year.

In March, a fire at the company disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space.

($1 = 0.8654 euros) (Reporting by Richard Lough, Mathieu Rosemain, Matthieu Protard; Writing by Mathieu Rosemain and Ingrid Melander; editing by Jason Neely)

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