TL;DR A fire at a NorthC data centre in Almere knocked Utrecht University offline, disabled public transport emergency communications across Utrecht province, and triggered an NL-Alert across Flevoland. The incident exposes the physical fragility beneath the digital infrastructure the Netherlands is spending billions to expand, and the failure of organisations to plan for the possibility that a single data centre might go down. A fire at a data centre in Almere on Thursday morning knocked a university offline, disabled the emergency communication system for public transport across an entire province, triggered an NL-Alert to residents across Flevoland, and required a crash tender from Lelystad Airport to cool a diesel tank on site. The fire broke out at approximately 8:30 a.m. at the rear of a facility operated by NorthC Datacenters, a Dutch colocation provider that runs 25 data centres across the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland.…