A false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street's only NYC datacenter

# Summary A false smoke alarm in Jane Street's Manhattan datacenter nearly triggered the building's sprinkler system, which would have destroyed the company's servers and trading infrastructure. The systems team had only minutes to shut down and disconnect every machine before the sprinklers activated, relying on the firm's insistence on maintaining manual power-cord access to critical systems—a safety measure inherited from the company's risk-averse culture.