St. Louis PBS affiliate Nine PBS sued Iron Mountain Data Centers after its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, went defunct and became unresponsive, leaving 50TB of archival data (including COVID-19 coverage and footage of the 1993 flood) inaccessible. A Denver District Court judge blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data and ruled it must hand over the physical devices, while Nine PBS must find a third party, such as a former OSS employee, to help retrieve the data within 30 days without affecting other OSS clients' data.
Questions this post answers
What happens to your data if your cloud storage provider suddenly goes out of business?
Data can become inaccessible if the underlying data center operator refuses to release it without proper authorization or a former employee to verify client boundaries. In one case, a defunct storage reseller, Open Source Storage, left St. Louis PBS affiliate Nine PBS unable to reach 50TB of archival footage stored at an Iron Mountain data center, forcing a lawsuit and a court order for retrieval. daily.dev surfaces stories like this for teams reassessing backup and vendor redundancy strategies.
Can a data center refuse to give a customer their own stored data?
Yes, when the storage relationship runs through an intermediary reseller that has gone defunct, a data center operator may claim it lacks authorization to release the underlying customer's data directly. Iron Mountain told reporters it had no access rights to the 50TB of Nine PBS data stored via reseller Open Source Storage, prompting a lawsuit and a judge's order to hand over the physical devices. Teams weighing direct-vendor versus reseller cloud contracts can track cases like this on daily.dev.