Dozens of hosting providers and VPN services experienced outages after the sudden shutdown of servers in the European nLighten data center. The incident affected companies working with Russian users, including VDSina, McHost, and several other providers.
The shutdown occurred after raids by Dutch authorities. A few days prior, the Netherlands' financial investigation service seized over 800 servers in a case involving possible violations of sanctions against Russia. Subsequently, nLighten disconnected MIRhosting's equipment without prior notice to clients.
The consequences were significant: according to market participants' estimates, at least 15,000 websites of one of the affected providers might have gone offline. Several VPN services were also impacted, forcing them to urgently relocate their infrastructure to other sites and restore operations using backups.
Experts believe that the incident highlighted the risk of dependence on a single jurisdiction and a single provider. If servers, backups, and key infrastructure are all within the same chain, a sudden shutdown can lead to cascading failures and customer loss.
Following this incident, some companies may more actively distribute their infrastructure across different countries and providers. For Russian businesses, European hosting may no longer be perceived as a neutral and reliable platform.
