Over the weekend, colocation giant Equinix suffered a fire at its SP4 facility in the São Paulo area of Brazil.

The “small” fire occurred at 12:34pm local time on Sunday (March 30), with the company confirming an “isolated incident” had happened within a customer’s electrical equipment. Water was discharged and the fire contained.

An update on an Equinix status page suggests the fire was in an unnamed dark fiber provider’s cage, causing a dark fiber link outage. This incident has impacted the Equinix Fabric circuits and virtual connections (VC) with OCI and GCP, resulting in service downtime.

Equinix said it resolved the issue by switching the affected CSP circuits to another path, restoring services by 20:56 UTC on the same day.

A separate update on March 31 noted the fiber path between SP1 and SP4 had been restored since 08:20 UTC on March 31, but the dark fiber provider was still working to restore a path between SP2 and SP4.

Equinix told us the facility is operating normally, and the cause of the fire was being investigated.

Equinix provided the following comment to DCD: “On March 30, 2025, an isolated fire incident occurred in one of the racks at the Equinix IBX SP4 data center, involving a customer’s electrical equipment. In alignment with our safety protocols, the site evacuation was conducted quickly and in an orderly manner, ensuring the protection of customers, suppliers and employees.”

“The technical team acted promptly in conjunction with local authorities to ensure that the incident was quickly controlled and service was restored. Only one data hall was partially impacted by the incident. All other unaffected racks were quickly re-energized, and new space has already been made available to the few customers who were most impacted so that they can reestablish their infrastructure.”

The company said it has kept impacted customers informed “from the outset.”

SP4 is located in the Tamboré business park in Barueri city near São Paulo. The two-story facility totals 29,320 sq ft (2,725 sqm) of colocation space. The data center was first opened in 2004 by Terremark before being taken over by Verizon and then Equinix in 2017. It is known as a major Internet Exchange points in Latin America.

Equinix said services are currently operating normally. IBX facility engineers are continuing to monitor for stability and investigate the root cause of the issue, the company added.

A report in BNAmericas suggests the fire was caused by packaging kept in turned-on equipment that had recently arrived at the data center. Equinix did not confirm that theory to the publication.

Teletime, citing emails sent to customers, suggests firefighters were called to the facility and the data center.

Brazilian Internet exchange IX.Br noted some services were unavailable after an incident including a fiber cut at Equinix’s SP4. Services were restored a day later. Industry observer Doug Madory of Kentik also noted Starlink was seemingly briefly affected in Brazil.

A version of this story appeared on our Brazilian edition.