Western Digital’s My Cloud service is back online after network breach causes two-week outage

It appears Western Digital has finally gotten on top of the network breach that crippled its network-attached storage (NAS) services, such as My Cloud Home, My Cloud Home Duo, My Cloud OS5, SanDisk Ibi and SanDisk Ixpand Wireless Charger. The websites for these products are back online after more than two weeks being offline, and the company confirmed this on its service status page.

This concludes a saga that started on March 26, when Western Digital discovered a network breach involving several of its systems, during which an unauthorised third party gaining access to the said systems; it is believed this third party managed to obtain some data.

As part of efforts to secure its business operations, the company took down its NAS services on April 2, while the company investigated the breach. During this two-week period, users accessing the My Cloud Home, My Cloud OS5 and Sandisk Ibi websites were greeted by a 503 error indicating that the services were unavailable, meaning that they were unable to access their data remotely.

In the meantime, Western Digital advised users to enable Local Access on their NAS systems, letting them access their data when connected to the same WiFi network as their drives. This requires them to access their devices using a hostname or IP address and sign in using their WD account.