[T0T0R0]

Everything in the article sounds like trigger-happy speculation at best. Their equipment was brought down during a fire drill, but reading the article, it doesn't seem like anyone actually says or knows why.

  According to people familiar with the system, the 
  pressure at ING Bank's data center was higher than 
  expected, and produced a loud sound when rapidly 
  expelled through tiny holes.

  The bank monitored the sound and it was very loud, 
  a source familiar with the system told us. “It was 
  as high as their equipment could monitor, over 
  130dB”.

  Sound means vibration, and this is what damaged the 
  hard drives.

Those are the words of the author, in that last sentence. It's simply journalism at this point. It's not something worth construing as a technical assessment.

They (the staff at Vice) just want to scoop the article, and get Vice into the action. Was it a siren that was too loud? Was it pressure differential, triggering a head crash in a bernoulli box?

Since we're at least two degrees removed from the actual events, and we'll probably never get direct information from a postmortem report, this article, to me, reads as: Data Center Outage in Eastern Europe, Reason Unknown