Kim Dotcom has some "very bad news" for Megaupload supporters: the embattled New Zealander tweeted earlier this week that 690 Megaupload servers housed with hosting provider LeaseWeb were wiped with no prior warning. The lost data belonged mostly to European users.
Dotcom said that in addition to the user data that was destroyed, the servers also contained important evidence that Megaupload's legal team planned to use in the company's defense.
For its part, LeaseWeb painted a somewhat less dramatic chain of events. Essentially, the hosting provider claims that it maintained Megaupload servers for free for a year and only decided to pull the plug after it looked like no one was interested in the data anymore.
"For over one whole year LeaseWeb kept 630 servers available, without any request to do so and without any compensation," said Alex de Joode, LeaseWeb's senior regulatory counsel in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post. "During the year we stored the servers and the data we received no request for access nor any request to retain the data. After a year of nobody showing any interest in the servers and data we considered our options."
Dotcom maintains that his lawyers explicitly requested that LeaseWeb retain the data contained on Megaupload servers, but the hosting provider claims that it was never contacted by Dotcom's representatives.
"We did inform Megaupload about our decision to re-provision the servers," de Joode stated. "As no response was received, we commenced the re-provisioning of the servers in February 2013. To minimize security risks and maximize the privacy of our clients, it is a standard procedure at LeaseWeb to completely clean servers before they are offered to any new customer."
In a tweet, Dotcom called the incident the "largest data massacre in the history of the Internet" and blamed the hosting provider, US government and the Department of Justice. LeaseWeb admits that the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service took 60 of the servers back to the US.
