M+E Daily
Megaupload Carries Fallout for Cloud Service Providers
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Two companies that stored customer data for Megaupload are facing fallout from the file-hosting site’s shutdown and criminal copyright prosecution by the U.S. government.
A letter filed in the case Friday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia noted that Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications Group could begin deleting data from their servers on Feb. 2, following the government’s execution of search warrants and the copying of some of the data (via AP/NPR). While the government claims that Megaupload encouraged its users to share millions of infringing files, the company insists that millions of its account holders have lost access to family photos and other personal files since the government shut down the site earlier in January.
The seeming prospect of account data being deleted has sparked outcry from Megaupload customers (see paidContent and ReadWriteWeb). An attorney for Megaupload tells AP that the company is working with prosecutors to try to preserve the data.
Meanwhile, Carpathia said in a statement on Monday that Megaupload users must resolve their data access concerns with Megaupload directly. “Carpathia Hosting does not have, and has never had, access to the content on Megaupload servers and has no mechanism for returning any content residing on such servers to MegaUpload’s customers,” the company says. “We would recommend that anyone who believes that they have content on Megaupload servers contact Megaupload. Please do not contact Carpathia Hosting.”
As for Cogent, Seeking Alpha reports that the loss of Megaupload’s business has already held implications for the publicly traded company. “The financial hit [to the company’s stock price] isn’t nearly as bad as the traffic hit of the nearly 50 petabytes per day of data which Cogent delivered, now reduced by around one-fourth,” a SeekingAlpha contributor reckoned last week.
