This week , a Nasdaq Nordic stock exchange data center in Finland was take down by its fire suppression scheme . But these systems do n’t apply water to quench the flames , so how can they pink out a bunch of hard drives ?

The answer , most likely , is tacky racket .

It would n’t be the first sentence this happened . like incidents occurredlast yearat a Microsoft ’s Azure data centre of attention in Europe and an ING Bank midpoint in Romaniain 2016.“When those system go off there ’s a shockwave that can interrupt the technology , ” Greg Schulz , laminitis of engineering advisory and consulting house StorageIO , secern Gizmodo .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

When a fire starts in a data center , it would n’t make sense to dump water on all of the machinery . So these centers rely instead on aspecial form of gas , usually consisting of carbon bonded to halogen element like chlorine or atomic number 9 . The gas usually dish to prevent oxygen from fire the flak .

But , explained Schulz , the exit of the gun can come with a shockwave . Sound is in the end just shakiness in the air , transform into noise by your brain . And inevitably , there are mechanical parts to calculator , like birl fan or even spinning disk driveway . Arecent studyby Siemens found that vibrations from phone as garish as 110 decibels could damage a strong drive . The fire extinguisher nozzles could be as flashy as 130 decibel .

Decibels , the rather dumb unit of sound saturation , do n’t work quite the mode in or degrees do . It ’s actuallya ratioof how much more intense something is than an agreed - upon threshold of audition , 0 decibels . If you increase the sound by a factor of 10 , you ’re increase it by 10 dB . That think that something 130 decibels loud is a million times louder than ambient noise ( 60 decibels ) and a hundred times tatty thana chainsaw .

William Duplessie

For this case , it ’s not clear what specific part of the fire system misfunction , but typically these trouble are a termination of a concatenation of events , order Schulz . And typically , data centers have backup centers that should instantly kvetch in , but did not in this case , cover industry siteDatacenter dynamic . Nasdaq Nordic has yet to responded to a Gizmodo request for gossip , but enjoin Datacenter Dynamics that it was investigate the delay ’s cause .

So yes , phone really can disrupt a hard effort ( or an total data point center ) . So do n’t fly your jet plane near your grueling disks .

[ Datacenter kinetics ]

Starship Test 9

Datadata centersScience

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