At Ackaia Corp., transparency is one of the fundamental pillars upon which we build our products. We believe that a service focused on privacy and security should not ask for blind trust; it should demonstrate it clearly, especially when things don’t go as planned.
Recently, we experienced a 14-hour outage of the Ackaia One Storage service. We know that many of our users, both new and old, were directly affected. This article aims to explain what happened, the lessons we learned from this event, and the engineering we implemented to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
What happened
During a peak traffic period, One Storage became completely inaccessible. The root cause was a fundamental infrastructure failure at the provider level hosting our physical data. It was a critical problem beyond our direct control, effectively severing the connection between our application servers and the raw storage disks.
The immediate result was unacceptable: the creation of new files and access to existing items were interrupted, directly impacting the platform experience. The complete timeline of the outage and detailed status updates from our team can be found in the official event log: https://status.ackaia.com/incident/893463.
The good news amidst the storm: our zero-knowledge architecture functioned exactly as designed. At no point was there a risk of exposure, metadata leaks, or compromise of confidentiality. The problem exclusively affected the availability of the raw hosting infrastructure.
What our team learned
The biggest lesson learned from this incident by our engineering team was about architectural resilience. When building Ackaia One, we rigorously focused on creating a private and mathematically impenetrable environment. However, relying on a single infrastructure mesh for physical storage created an unwanted single point of failure.
We learned that, however strong the end-to-end encryption generated in browsers may be, the operation cannot be subject to systemic outages from a single network provider. True data sovereignty requires that control over where the encrypted block resides be agile and decentralized.
The Ultimate Solution: Multi-Cloud Redundancy
To ensure that this type of outage never happens again, our engineering team developed an architectural reconstruction of the file flow in Ackaia One, focused on continuous high availability.
From now on, the system features an intelligent routing engine and a distributed infrastructure with cascading redundancy. What does this mean in practice?
When your browser initiates the transmission of an encrypted object with the mandatory uploading status, our system assesses the health of the primary network. If the primary infrastructure becomes unstable, refuses connections, or fails catastrophically, the contingency engine intercepts this error invisibly. In milliseconds, the file route is transferred to a stable secondary infrastructure.
This safeguard transition occurs in real time, without exposing failure messages to the user. The storage status seamlessly advances to active, whether the final destination of the data is the primary or alternative axis. This approach completely neutralizes the risk of systemic dependency on any single entity.
Our Commitment
We sincerely apologize to all users affected by the disruption. We built our technologies to be safe havens for your data, and any breach of reliability is treated with the utmost seriousness. This incident served as a catalyst for us to evolve the Ackaia One infrastructure to a level of unbreakable stability, aligned with our privacy-first policy.
For subscribers of One Personal 100GB or higher plans, we have added a 7-day free extension to your subscriptions as an apology.
We will continue building with a focus on excellence, learning quickly from operational challenges and, as always, leading transparently.