The FBI seized several Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday morning, causing several websites to go offline, The New York Times reported.
The raid occurred round 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by Switzerland-based company DigitalOne.
“This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company,” said DigitalOne’s chief executive, Sergej Ostroumow, in an email to clients Tuesday afternoon. “In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it.”
Ostroumow told The Times that the FBI was only interested in one of the company’s clients, but seized entire server racks used by tens of clients. He did not name the targeted company.
DigitalOne was apparently notified by the data center’s operator about the raid three hours after it started. It had no employees on-site when the raid took place.
The motivation behind the raid remains unknown, and the FBI didn’t comment, according to The Times.
One of the sites affected belonged to Curbed Network, the New York publisher behind the blogs Curbed, Eater, Racked and Gridskipper. Those blogs remained down through Tuesday evening but were not the target of the raid, Curbed Network’s president Lockhart Steele told The Times.
The raid also disrupted the bookmarking site Pinboard and a server used by Instapaper, a digital service that saves articles for users to read later.
