For reasons unknown, the FBI raided a data centre and seized several servers, causing known online brands, including Pinboard and those in the Curbed network, to go offline.
New York Times‘ Bits blog says that the data centre is owned by DigitalOne, a Swiss company operating in the US.
“The raid was on a hosting facility in the United States used by DigitalOne, a company based in Switzerland. It was not immediately clear what the F.B.I. was looking for.
In a note to one of its clients, a DigitalOne employee, Sergej Ostroumow, said: ‘This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server – we can not check it.’”
DigitalOne says everything the FBI was after revolved around a single client. Yet they took more server racks than required (three enclosures worth, to be exact). As a result, Pinboard has been left running on a backup server, and the Curbed sites are still down. What’s on those servers? [NYT]