Western Digital MyCloud Service

I’m just curious whether anyone else is following the Western Digital hack/outage story. I’m a long-time WD MyCloud NAS user, and the service has been offline since last weekend. Like…completely offline. Their MyCloud Home and OS5 services are completely down, including WD Discovery and login, meaning that unless you previously configured local access to your device, you can’t even access data on a device that’s physically in your own home. I haven’t seen too much news about it, so I figured I’d start the discussion here.

It seems that WD (finally) disclosed that they were hacked sometime in the past few weeks, and that some user data was taken/compromised. I’m unclear whether it was a ransomware kind of thing or they shut down the service as a precaution, but either way, there are a lot of unhappy WD customers right now. There has been next to no communication from the company on the matter…I still haven’t as much as a single email or notification about the outage. And WD’s customer support site is offline as well.

Obviously, it’s not a great look for WD, no matter how you slice it. They got hacked, but at this point, their combination of radio silence, service downtime, and completely locking out the vast majority of their userbase has likely eroded any trust in their ability to provide a secure personal cloud service. I’ve heard from other customers on Twitter saying they’ll wait until the service is back up to get their data, but they’re already swearing off ever using WD again.

In my case, I don’t keep anything too important on my MyCloud…mostly just my media collection. All my personal docs, photos, etc. live on OneDrive and Google Drive. But MyCloud does/did automatically back up those services locally as well. And I also had the good fortune to enable local access to my MyCloud device via SMB a little while back, so after a few tweaks to my mapped drives, I’ve been largely unaffected by the outage. My Plex server can still access and play my media, and I can still manage content through a local mapped drive. Y’know, maybe that’s not such a bad way to run things…