GENEVA — At least seven major data center facilities across Europe have documented what operators are calling synchronization anomalies—identical system behaviors occurring simultaneously across sites with no shared network infrastructure, according to incident reports filed with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) between November 2025 and January 2026.
The reports, first compiled by ETSI's Critical Infrastructure Working Group on 8 January, describe cooling system adjustments, power load redistributions, and server cluster activations occurring within milliseconds of each other at facilities in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. Operators emphasized that the affected systems were air-gapped and physically isolated from one another.
ETSI spokesperson Martina Köhler confirmed the institute had received the reports but cautioned against speculation. "We are conducting a technical review to determine whether these incidents represent equipment malfunction, measurement error, or some other explainable phenomenon," she said in a statement issued Tuesday. "At this stage, no conclusions have been reached."
Facilities Describe Identical Patterns
According to documentation reviewed by this publication, the first recorded incident occurred on 23 November 2025 at 03:17 UTC, when monitoring systems at a facility operated by Nordic Infrastructure Partners in Luleå, Sweden logged an unscheduled thermal adjustment across 340 server racks. Within four milliseconds, facilities in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Zurich recorded identical adjustments—despite having no direct communication links and operating under different management systems.
Lindqvist, speaking at an industry conference in Copenhagen last week, said his team had conducted three independent audits of their monitoring equipment and found no faults. He declined to comment further when contacted by this publication.
Industry analysts have offered varied interpretations. Dr. Yuki Tanaka, a distributed systems researcher at ETH Zurich, suggested the events could reflect previously unknown electromagnetic interference patterns, possibly linked to degraded shielding in post-collapse infrastructure. "We rebuilt quickly after 2024. Not always carefully," she noted in an email exchange.
Others have been more skeptical. Werner Hoffmann, a former technical director at the German Federal Office for Information Security, called the reports "technically incoherent" and suggested the operators may be misinterpreting routine system logs. "Correlation is not synchronization," he wrote in a blog post that circulated widely among infrastructure professionals this week.
Regulators Urge Caution
The European Commission's Directorate-General for Communications Networks said it was monitoring the situation but had not opened a formal investigation. A spokesperson noted that data center operations remain under national jurisdiction, and that the affected facilities had reported no service disruptions or security breaches.
ETSI's inquiry is expected to conclude by March. Köhler said the institute would publish its findings "in full, regardless of outcome." None of the affected operators have disclosed whether the synchronization events are ongoing.