Furious MyCloud users descend on WD website as borkage continues

When a Western Digital president mass mails MyCloud users about the ongoing outage, you know it's a serious matter.

Angry users generated 33 pages of complaints on WD’s community website after El Reg reported the MyCloud outage last week.

Some users say that their devices are not visible while others complain of never-ending “loading” messages, WD not authenticating passwords and the dashboard app not loading.

User Prototyp_Gottes wrote: “If I use the desktop app, it works properly. I can see all folders and can also access them without any problems.”

The hapless box-owner continued:

But I still have problems with my remote access. Using wd2go.com, I only can pass the login screen. After clicking on my My Cloud device, my browser keeps on loading and nothing happens. And by using my mobile apps it is almost the same. At least I can see all the public folders, when I try to access via mobile apps. But after opening the public folder my mobile app also keeps on loading and won't show me the folders within the public folder.

WD president Jim Murphy’s mass mail went out on Sunday 6 April and said this:

Dear Customer,

At WD, our commitment to you is reliable, secure and easily accessible storage for your most valuable content. This past week you may have experienced a service disruption for our personal cloud products. If you have been directly affected by this, I want to extend my personal, sincerest apology.

We understand how important your content is to you, your business and your family. Our customers are the reason we strive each day to make better products and services that enable you to enjoy this content. Your entire digital life must be safely stored and readily accessible, and is what makes the WD personal cloud, personal. While your data has remained safe and accessible in your home or office, the service disruption may have temporarily prevented some of you from remotely accessing that content. We've dedicated the past week to restoring your remote access as quickly as possible.

Your feedback to us has been invaluable. All of us at WD are committed to minimizing downtime and ensuring the service information we provide is valuable and frequent. We already have implemented important changes to our infrastructure and network capability. While we have validated the vast majority of your remote connections, we continue our focus on providing uninterrupted access from your phone, tablet or computer. Your content deserves nothing less.

We recognize the importance of our role in your digital life and we will continue working relentlessly to deliver the great products and services you have come to expect from WD. For more information about our personal cloud service restoration, I encourage you to visit wd.com.

Sincerely,

Jim Murphy

President, WD Subsidiary

Let’s cut to the chase.

1. This past week you may have experienced a service disruption for our personal cloud products (i.e. there has been a week-long outage.)

2. I want to extend my personal, sincerest apology.

3. While your data has remained safe and accessible in your home or office, the service disruption [has] … prevented some of you from remotely accessing that content.

4. We've [tried this] past week to [restore] your remote access.

5. We … have implemented … changes to our infrastructure and network capability.

6. … we have validated the vast majority of your remote connections (but not all of them)

7. … we will continue working relentlessly - (it’s not fixed yet.)

WD isn't being very transparent about this. Why is there a problem? Why is it taking so long to fix? Being kept in the dark isn't going to improve its frustrated users' blood pressure.

WD community website user karimero wrote this morning:

A few days ago I thought the problem was solved. Back at work now, trying to login. And there it is again: unable to access device. (0).

Fail. Fail. Fail.

Never again a WD product.

I'm told by a fellow Reg scribe: "Folks have been complaining that the Mionet remote access service for My Book World Edition service is out too. Indeed, you can't log on to it from anything, which I discovered when setting up a MBWE up last Tuesday."

Many non-connecting MyCloud users may well be thinking that WD’s infrastructure is not good enough for the task at hand and that WD’s ability to deal with outages is inadequate. ®