FBI Seizes Web Servers, Knocking Sites – Including Pinboard – Offline

Verne G. Kopytoff, reporting for the NYT:

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.”

It continued: “F.B.I. was interesting only in one of clients and it is absolutely unintelligible, why they took servers of tens of clients. After FBI’s unprofessional ‘work’ we can not restart our own servers, that’s why our website is offline and support doesn’t work. We are still in trying to solve this problem and all our colleagues are at work since 15 hours.”

Yikes. See also: Pinboard’s status page.

★ Tuesday, 21 June 2011