According to the latest reports which we will continue to bring you as developments are relayed to us by long-time sources who have been on the scene through the whole ordeal, a building separate from Infinite Loop’s central structures which currently houses much of the company’s IT/server/networking team — the people who bring us Apple’s web sites, downloads, Software Updates and other services both internal and external in its vast corporate network — suffered a serious fire and considerable damage early Wednesday Pacific Time.

Over $2 Million US Dollars in damage is believed to have been done, possibly including physical items and/or data which is considered either irreplaceable or only able to be reconstructed at considerable effort — in some cases, according to our sources, solutions to Apple’s internal networking problems and an emerging package of solutions for Apple’s severely strained Retail Store network (forcing some stores’ managers to pay out of local funds for business-class broadband to take strain off their anemic corporate-provided connections which are even now usually painfully slow due to the traffic overload) which could cost far more than the physical damage might suggest to restore and actually begin implementing for future product roll-outs so there are no repeats of the “iPhone 3G roll-out snafu”…..

Thankfully no one was injured in the blaze, and the damage though considerable in the affected areas and requiring highly disruptive cleanup & repair for weeks if not months to come while many affected employees will have to be relocated elsewhere on campus….was localized only to the second level and roof of Building 6.

Though actual fire damage was relatively modest to the structure itself….smoke damage and the usual complicating factors involved in fires which occur within high-tech office/datacenter type environments will make many headaches for folks at Apple for a while to come.

Prior to this news breaking, we had been preparing a series of articles to jump-start our coverage for the upcoming late Summer/early Autumn (here in the Northern Hemisphere) which we believe to be one of the most exciting periods of time thus far in Apple’s history.

And though this fire will no doubt have some impact on Apple’s efforts to eliminate some troublesome bottlenecks and inadequacies which have crept into what is otherwise one of the world’s best performing, most well-run and indeed most efficiently run IT/network infrastructures of any company in its league — or any company anywhere….we don’t think it will have more than a marginal impact on the tremendously exciting developments we’re following in expectation of a record-breaking final quarter of calendar year 2008.