From what I can find, the managing director of the company that runs serverspace.io (ITGLOBAL.COM NL), which is the company that rents me the VPS space, was arrested by Dutch authorities. The infrastructure in Amsterdam was disconnected without warning when this happened. Since my latest database backup is unfortunately not very recent, and because there is still hope that the severs will come back up, I am waiting and hoping that I regain access to the data. They originally published some somewhat optimistic message, but as of today their website is inaccessible.

https://www.comnews.ru/content/247454/2026-09-21/2026-w39/1007/globus-dlya-itglobal-umenshilsya

https://theins.ru/news/297340

I could not find any statements from Dutch police or really any source other than IT Global themselves. But, this event may be related to "Dmitry Gachko" (owner of ITGlobalcom Rus) being added to this sanctions list: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dec/2024/1484/2026-07-13

I recieved no warning, and I did not know about the ownership structure of serverspace and did not consider that the infrastructure was exposed to this risk. I figured "VPS in Amsterdam from a Dutch company" was rather safe. But "Dutch company operating in NL" does not mean the same as Dutch owned...

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Out of curiosity, are there any updates on this from Sal? I'm not in that Matrix currently

[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I haven't seen anything, but I am not in any mander-specific rooms. The above is what Sal posted to #lemmy-support-general:discuss.online after somebody had asked about it.

[–] quinacridone@lemmy.ml 31 points 1 week ago

Thank you so much for this, mander has always been reliable so I thought it must be significant problem

Here's hoping sal can work their tech magic and either recover the databases or set up a new one

Thanks again, much appreciated 👍

[–] tal@lemmy.today 8 points 1 week ago

Since my latest database backup is unfortunately not very recent, and because there is still hope that the severs will come back up, I am waiting and hoping that I regain access to the data.

This won't help with password changes and new accounts and the like, but because Fediverse hosts federate data, I wonder if it is possible, with the help of a trusted other instance or two, to reconstruct much data from federated data that has moved to other hosts, to viably recover from there.

If technically possible to make a tool that could viably recover from federated data, it might help not just in this instance, but in the event of future instance losses, which I'm sure will happen.

As someone once put it:

I also noticed that my harddisk on "linux.cs.helsinki.fi" (which is where I keep the primary development sources) seems to be going, so keep your fingers crossed. I thought I'd better upload what I have now, rather than notice that I lost everything when I get back to work on Monday..

(Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)

---Linus Torvalds, 1996, Linux Kernel Mailing List