Reason #29: A Major Data Outage
Western Digital was hit with a major outage on Saturday of last week, people can't access their data, and they are PISSED. The biggest issue? The data is literally on a hard drive that is a matter of meters away, but the data can't be accessed because of an outage to log into an online account.
Good news! There's a setting you can toggle to enable local access to the drive! The only issue there? You have to be logged in to WD to toggle it!
Many have been framing this as a "cloud outage", but that feels a bit misleading. In fact: it seems you could pull the data from the drives if you just teardown the enclosure, as the files are actually unencrypted.
The worst part of all of this (for me at least) is the complete lack of communication outside of "yeah we turned everything off". It has been 5 days of silence. I have freelancer friends who can't access key business documents.
Western Digital sold the MyCloud devices as an idiot-proof way to access files on the go. A NAS that was also a server accessible from anywhere in the world. Turns out that Western Digital was the only real idiot all along.
Today was a 5/10
This post is part of a series called "The Reason". I haven't committed to living forever, but I find a reason to live for one more day every day. Read the rest of the series here.