Western Digital (WD) appears to have fixed an issue which caused its My Cloud drives to lose a major aspect of their functionality – remote access to their storage. In a service issues update about 12 hours ago, WD apologised for the inconvenience and told people who are still enduring problems to reboot their devices.
Many WD MyBook World Live, WD My Cloud EX1, EX2 and EX4 storage device users had reportedly been unable to access their storage while outside their home network environment since 26th March. WD explains in its latest service update that it "experienced a major server issue that intermittently prevented users from making those remote connections while using a smart phone, tablet or computer." However things have now been patched up; "We have been diligently working to repair the servers, and now have completed that work."
Now that things appear to have been fixed users should be able to get back to enjoying their own personal clouds – which nevertheless rely upon WD's WD2Go.com 'man in the middle' device access service. However users have been irked by the lack of communications from WD since 26th March and a no-fault stance it has apparently held. TechRepublic reports that WD has trotted out the same canned, uninformative response to troubled users on its forums for a whole week and says users' dissenting and critical posts on official forums have been deleted without trace.
The past weeks' problems have also highlighted that what a user might call My Cloud is really WD's Cloud due to that service reliance. If ever WD decides to stop supporting the product or it went bust, for example, there's a possibility that the WD2Go service may have its plug pulled.
