IT outage hits one of Europe’s biggest cloud computing groups

Paris: A “human error” took down the servers of one of Europe’s biggest cloud computing groups on Wednesday, causing thousands of websites to crash for more than hour, the company said.

OVHcloud, a French tech success story which is set to launch an initial public offering on Friday, attributed the problem to an intervention on a part of its network in the United States following persistent cyber-attacks.

Octave Klaba, the Polish-born founder of the group, said it was “a human error” in a message posted on Twitter.

The timing of the outage is embarrassing for the group which is hoping to sell shares worth 350 million euros ($400 million) on Friday, which would value the whole group at 3.5-3.75 billion euros.