Western Digital’s Cloud Network Has Been Down for Five Days

Earlier this week, Western Digital confirmed that its network security was breached and some data was obtained. In response, the company shut down some of its systems. Five days later and the network is still down.

On April 2, Western Digital said that the outage affected My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk ibi, and SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger, and promised it would provide an update the following day.

On April 3, the company did issue another statement, but it did not expand much on the situation:

“We are currently experiencing a service interruption that is preventing customers from accessing the My Cloud, My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS 5, SanDisk ibi, SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger service,” the notice on the My Cloud status page reads. “Our team is working urgently to resolve the issue and restore access as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience.”

Today, April 7, the network remains down. PetaPixel spoke to a photographer who uses the My Cloud service and they can confirm that they have not had access to their files since last weekend.

More Than Just My Cloud

What is perhaps worse is that this outage may be more significant than Western Digital has indicated. When PetaPixel attempted to reach out to the company to ask for an update, the following was received:

“We are experiencing a network service outage and your message has not been delivered. When services are restored, your message will be delivered to the intended recipient. Thank you for your patience.”

The outage is at least so significant that it has also taken out at least some email communications with the company.

A Historic Outage

Networks go down — it happens all the time. However, most network outages that affect general consumer users are resolved within a matter of hours. Over the years, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Apple iCloud, and even IBM have experienced outages that ranged in length from less than an hour to upwards of half a day. Anything lasting longer than a day is, however, exceptionally rare.

Although Atlassian’s two-week outage last year might be the worst on record, nearly a week without access to personal data and the fact the company’s email is also down is not insignificant.

Local Access Has Been Restored

Update 4/7: Western Digital has been able to restore some functionality to its systems, but cloud access remains down. In an update, the company has provided the most new information since early this week:

Product Owners of My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, and SanDisk ibi,

We are currently experiencing a service interruption that is preventing files access and use of the applications provided for your product, including the mobile, desktop, and web apps. During this service interruption, you may now access files stored locally on your device using a feature called Local Access.

The Local Access feature allows you to directly access your personal files from a Windows or MacOS computer that is connected to the same network as your device. To enable Local Access, use your favorite browser and connect to your device’s Dashboard. Then enable the Local Access feature and create a new Local Access account. For more detailed instructions and walk-thru video, visit this knowledge base article.

For the My Cloud OS5 (My Cloud PR series and EX series) products, local access is already enabled and functional.

We continue to make every effort to restore all services as quickly as possible and will provide updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate the patience of our user community as we continue our urgent efforts to restore all services.

Update on 4/13/23: Western Digital is reaching out to customers to announce that services are back online. Here’s the text of the email:

Dear My Cloud customer,

We’d like to inform you that our services are back online and fully operational.

Our engineering and support teams have worked around the clock to resolve this outage and we are happy to report that our login and cloud access services have been restored. You can now fully connect to your WD My Cloud and SanDisk ibi family of products.

We understand this service interruption has been challenging, and we thank you for your patience. As always, our customer support team is available to assist you with any questions you may have.

Thank you for being a valued customer and your continued support of Western Digital.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.