Western Digital has finally fixed a week-long outage of its My Cloud and MyBook Live services.
The company noted on April 3 it had been having trouble with its servers since March 26 and the issue impacted service on its MyBook World Live, WD My Cloud EX1, EX2 and EX4 devices. The outage prevented Western Digital users from accessing home devices remotely. Western Digital is still working to fix issues connected to its Mionet service, but expects that to be completed on April 7.
The outage is particularly painful to Western Digital because the personal cloud products that went offline are the center of the company's attempt to compete with online cloud competitors like Dropbox. The company has hyped that its WD My Cloud and MyBook Live are not only more secure, but more reliable than competing online services.
"At WD, our commitment to you is reliable, secure and easily accessible storage for your most valuable content. This past week you may have experienced a service disruption for our personal cloud products. If you have been directly affected by this, I want to extend my personal, sincerest apology," said Jim Murphy, Western Digital president.
Western Digital customers almost instantly took to social media to voice displeasure with the outage, which the company was polite enough to acknowledge in an email to customers this weekend.
"Your feedback to us has been invaluable. All of us at WD are committed to minimizing downtime and ensuring the service information we provide is valuable and frequent. We already have implemented important changes to our infrastructure and network capability. While we have validated the vast majority of your remote connections, we continue our focus on providing uninterrupted access from your phone, tablet or computers," Murphy said.
However, the company did not explain why the outage happened nor outlined a time frame for when the final service fix would be rectified.
Having an online service go down is not a unique experience. Every company from Google to Dropbox suffers outages at some point, but several sites have pointed out that Western Digital was not upfront and public about the issue as it should have been.
Typically when big sites go down the vendor immediately takes to the social media airwaves to explain the situation and keep users up to date, which was something Western Digital did not do until much later in this crisis.
