nLighten confiscated hardware of MIRhosting and its colocation customers
For context, MIRhosting got in hot water recently after it's founder got arrested for his affiliation with PQ.hosting. He was released shortly afterwards. (link)
On June 2, MIRhosting had all of its hardware, including colo racks of their customers taken offline by nLighten in Netherlands and Germany. As far as I know, it's was not an action of law enforcement.
To this day hardware remains offline, and customers are unable to access it in nLighten datacenters.
It has escalated to a battle between nLighten and lawyers of affected customers.
Statements from some of the affected hosts can be read here: https://hosting.kitchen/tag/nLighten/ (archive)
It affects multiple providers, some of which are present here.
Comments
EnLighten mahNuts
Free NAT KVM | Free NAT LXC
Kinda guessed it would be russians before clicking on the link
Damn, nLighten aren't messing around... I wonder if anything has gone down at Serverius..
Affected hosts are:
AlexHost.com (AS200019)
VDSina.com (AS216071)
HIP.hosting (AS41745)
Datacheap.ru (AS215305)
IHC.ru (AS216139)
Weasel.cloud (AS41745)
RuWEB.net (AS216139)
EuroByte.ru (AS216139)
Hosting-VDS.com (AS216129)
McHost.ru (AS216139)
KVMka.ru (AS216024)
LandVPS.ru (AS216300)
SebekVPS.com (AS216129)
Retzor.com (AS215305)
Its possible there is even more of them, some smaller resellers I did not find yet.
Coverage on Russian forums and media:
https://hostsuki.pro/all/ocherednoy-evropeyskiy-pozor---data-centr-nlighten-otklyuchil-klientov.html (archive)
https://www.ruscable.ru/forum/theme-612337/ (archive)
https://gamemodels3d.com/forum/?topic=2755 (archive)
https://internet-lab.ru/hosting_800 (archive)
https://searchengines.guru/ru/forum/1142851 (archive)
https://habr.com/ru/news/1043210/ (archive)
https://runet.news/news/70926 (archive)
There have been no updates yet on when nLighten releases the hardware, everyone is still locked out and hardware powered off.
Some providers started migrating to other locations using offsite backups.
No public statements regarding this from MIRhosting (or its founder) either, he for sure was a "free" man a few days ago. I do not know whether he got arrested again.
Needless to say, I think that was an extreme overreach by nLighten and most of these affected hosting providers are innocent.
Unless it somehow turns out to be law enforcement action, I expect nLighten to be sued and pay a lot in compensations.