Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over 50TB of blocked archival data
Original: Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data
Why This Matters
The case highlights critical data custody and vendor failure risks facing public media institutions managing long-term digital archives.
St. Louis public broadcaster Nine PBS filed a lawsuit on July 28 against Iron Mountain Data Centers in Denver District Court, seeking recovery of over 50 terabytes of archival materials after cloud-storage vendor Open Source Storage went defunct, cutting off access without warning on March 6.
Nine PBS, the St. Louis-based public broadcaster, filed suit against information management firm Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, alleging that it has been blocked from accessing more than 50 terabytes of archival content stored in one of Iron Mountain's Denver facilities.
The dispute stems from the station's relationship with cloud-storage vendor Open Source Storage (OSS), which Nine PBS had contracted with since 2019 through OSS' predecessor. OSS abruptly terminated the station's access on March 6, 2026 — the contract expiration date — without any prior warning, despite the agreement requiring 30 days for data retrieval upon termination.
When Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS, it found the company's website defunct and its status listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State. Further investigation revealed that OSS had its own separate arrangement with Iron Mountain to house the physical storage infrastructure.
Nine PBS sent a demand letter to Iron Mountain on March 13, offering to cover reasonable costs for data recovery. Iron Mountain has refused to release the materials, citing that its client OSS technically owned the physical services housing the data.
Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman confirmed the legal action, stating the blocked archives span "70 years of our organization's history," including coverage of the Great Flood of 1993, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the history of East St. Louis. A Denver district judge granted the station's motion for temporary relief, barring Iron Mountain from deleting or overwriting the data, and scheduled a hearing for August 13.