You know what April 8th means? That’s right. This means that Western Digital’s cloud network was down for five days.
The data storage company announced on Sunday, April 2, that it was experiencing a service interruption. This affected a number of products including My Cloud, My Cloud Home Duo and My Cloud OS5. SanDisk ibi and SanDisk Ixpand wireless charger. The company apologized and stated that they were “working to restore service”.
We didn’t hear much in the days that followed. On April 3, Western Digital released a follow up statement that basically said the same thing as before, and a press release clarifying its intention to “take proactive measures to protect its business operations, including taking services and systems offline.”
The contacted Western Digital for more information but they declined to comment. Our email did get through, other outlets appear to have received bounce backs.
Western Digital declined to comment
The company posted what may be the first helpful post today for those who have been affected by the network since the original announcement. The update shows that My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo and SanDisk SanDisk ibi owners can still access files stored on their devices using a Local Access feature. It is now “enabled” and functional for My Cloud OS5 products.
Any Windows or macOS computer connected to the same network can be enabled by owners to enable local access. To enable local access, users will need to create a Local Access account. This can be a complex process so make sure you follow the instructions. It appears that your device must have been set up before the crash. So new owners will need patience.
According to the April 3rd announcement, this whole mess is caused by a “network security issue” that allowed an unauthorized party to access company data. My Cloud customers are becoming more restless and complaining that they cannot access the data on their devices.
This is not the first time that customer data has been compromised by Western Digital. Hackers wiped all of My Book Live’s cloud storage products in the middle of 2021. This affected what was according to some estimates, petabytes user data. Western Digital offered free data recovery services as well as a trade-in program to My Book Live owners.
