How A Fire In France Is Hurting Rust

Fires are devastating events that can instantly destroy treasured possessions and memories — or worse. When considering the dangers of fire, it's not often you worry about long-distance repercussions. Unfortunately, in the modern age, where important information is stored on servers around the world, it's not just your immediate surroundings you have to worry about. You may still lose something in a fire taking place in another location. This is exactly the kind of loss some Rust fans will face.

On the evening of March 9, the Rust Twitter account responded to reports of EU server outages that prevented users from connecting for more than seven hours. Early the next morning, the account reported "a fire at OVH Datacenter," which took out an entire SBG-2 building and affected 25 EU servers. Unfortunately, those servers were damaged beyond repair, forcing the company to replace them with new servers. Since the incident, the account has been posting updates as servers come back online. Fortunately, no one was injured in the event, according to Eurogamer.

There was one major casualty, however, and that was data. Although the latest update clarified that the data loss only applied to the servers that were destroyed, this will cause many users to lose all of their player progression.

Naturally, fans are in an uproar over the thought of losing all of their progress. One tweet read "we better get something in return for all of the people that grind this week off for their bases and S—!" The user added, "Get on with it and compensate people." Many in the thread are wondering why Facepunch does not back up its data; however, some have defended the company's lack of data safeguards.

If you're an active Rust player, you know that Rust forces progress wipes every month. Because of this, if your data was tied to one of the 25 servers that were destroyed, in theory, you would only lose a little over a week's worth of progress. As one Twitter user speculated, this could explain why Facepunch doesn't back its servers. But what is the full extent of data loss? Is it possible that some may lose their most expensive skins and other valuable assets, or just short-term progress?

Fans of the game will have to wait and see if the company will offer any form of compensation for significant in-game losses.