The Curbed family of blogs are down today due to an FBI raid on their servers, which are outsourced to a hosting facility in Virginia.
Curbed’s tech team first noticed the outage around 3 a.m. but the usual solutions of “plugging something back” didn’t cut it, Curbed chief Lockhart Steele told Off the Record. The Virginia hosting company was unresponsive too.
For good reason! In the middle of the night the FBI took three “enclosures with equipment plugged into them,” presumably including Curbed’s. An employee wrote:
(Sic maintained for Cold War urgency.)
FBI 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, thats 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. Our attorney is also at work.
As of this writing, no one from Curbed has been arrested. Their tech team is restoring from the back-up servers and they expect to be live tomorrow. Meanwhile, the editors are taking a snow day and having margaritas at Peels.
“It’s totally child pornography,” Off the Record said, unnecessarily.
“Looks like we won’t be launching our new vertical anytime soon,” Mr. Steele quipped.
