Tata Communications, a major player in Indian telecommunications industry, has reportedly recovered a large chunk of the data that was lost when a fire broke out at its data center in Next-Gen Tower, located in Greater Kailash-1, New Delhi on June 5, 2026. The data center is leased by Tata Communications and operated by ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC). The fire had adversely impacted a number of the data center’s customers, including Google.
According to reports, the fire started when lithium battery units ignited. No casualties were reported at the facility, and firefighters were able to contain the blaze. Following the incident, Tata Communications said it had activated its business continuity protocols. However, the fire did lead to a service disruption at the data center, affecting Google Cloud services among others.
On Monday, weeks after the fire, Google announced that despite capacity being restored, Google Cloud traffic originating from Delhi, Chennai, and Mumbai may still experience elevated latency and potential packet loss.
“We completed the augmentation of out-of-region Internet Edge regional peering capacity in Chennai to provide additional load-balancing and redundancy to large ISPs in India. Service to a large portion of Internet Edge peering capacity has been restored to reduce latency in the local Delhi metropolitan area. We are now recovered and returned to normal service as of Friday, 2026-06-26 PDT,” Google wrote in an incident update.
Meanwhile, Tata Communications has said that it is working closely with affected customers on recovering their data.
“A majority of the data of the customers who were affected has now been successfully recovered, with only limited cases requiring further validation and rebuilding. Some customers with resilient multi-location architectures experienced no disruption, whereas some customers faced temporary operational disruption due to the time required to recover critical systems; however, overall business impact has not been material, and the Company’s operations continue unaffected,” Zubin Adil Patel, Company Secretary and Compliance Officer, Tata Communications, said in a submission to the National Stock Exchange.
News reports from the incident showed widespread damage to the facility. A letter sent by Tata Communications to customers, seen by Reuters, further suggests the damage is extensive, which may complicate data recovery for customers.
Matrix Cellular, a firm selling international SIM cards, told Reuters that it was struggling to recover two decades of data that has seemingly been lost due to the incident.
“It’s been 20 days and they have not restored backup. If there is a backup it should have been restored by now,” Gaurav Khanna, CEO, Matrix Cellular, told Reuters.
While infrequent, fires starting in data centers are not rare. According to insurance brokerage Lockton, between 2014 and 2023 there were 22 significant fires and explosions at data centers. The main causes of these and other data center fires were electrical failures, overheating, UPS battery failures, inadequate maintenance, and human error. With data centers housing ever more compute power, it’s up to operators to ensure their environments are able to detect and suppress fires before they get out of control.