Good morning. We're back online. Sorry about that.

So. The site was just taken offline by our host for 12 hours and 53 minutes.

Why?

A Swiss-Frenchman sent a single-line email to the wrong company, saying we host content that is illegal under US law (videos of people dying).

This company then forwarded that email to our host.

Rather than investigating this in any way, our host immediately took the site offline and locked us out of the server.

They then told us that we need to remove all content that is illegal in the US. To clarify, they said that we need to remove people dying from WatchPeopleDie.

We replied that videos of people dying are NOT illegal under US law. We cited relevant caselaw and precedent.

The actual company is likely out of the office, since this was around 1am their time, so the "Adam" we were dealing with spoke poor English and just repeated himself: "take illegal content down to come back."

We told them "okay, the illegal content is taken down."

"Adam from America" then said "How? I lock you out. You can't take down. Please explain steps how you take down."

We then emailed the piece of shit who emailed the wrong company explaining that it is not illegal and cited laws to him.

He replied and said "oops, sorry for shutting down your business for 12 hours because I have nothing else going on in my life. My bad."

We then forwarded a screenshot of this email to "Adam" at our host who, apparently, decided that a screenshot of an email is sufficient proof of what American law is (after he had previously determined that actual American law citations are insufficient proof), which we had already cited at him.

And now we're back online.

How will this be prevented in the future?

Well, we won't be relying on this fucking host anymore since they're apparently chomping at the bit to arbitrarily violate their service agreement with us based on a single line email from a foreign country to another company. In the meantime, we are setting up a fairly simple reverse proxy host with a more competent company who will actually, you know, look into complaints, rather than just immediately shut down the site without any investigation, notice, or communication whatsoever. We'll be setting up a few of these actually, just in case one shits the bed like our current host.

This will (probably) never happen again. But I'm not willing to say that completely, because as this episode shows, there is truly no bottom to the depths of human stupidity.

Other

I don't know. I'm exhausted and I've been up pretty much all night. I'm sending everyone 1000 coins with a link to this thread just to ensure it gets seen. None of this was anyone's fault but our host's, but I feel genuinely guilty about it and I'm really sorry for the outage. Utter lunacy, start to finish. I'll post the full logs in the future if we ever fully cut ties with this joke of a company, both my customer support ticket last night (Clit: Hey, I don't have login credentials for our server right now, but can you just tell me if there are any known general service outages? "Jen": Sir yes I can help you but please login. "Jen": Sir I am pleasing you to login for help?), and the clownshow with "Adam" all this morning. It's the most kafkaesque insanity I've ever seen.

SORRY.

In closing: Fuck Switzerland, fuck the Swiss, fuck France, fuck the French, fuck Europe, fuck the EU, fuck tech companies, fuck customer service employees, and fuck censorship.

I love you.
xoxo clitpeeler 💋