The Federal Bureau of Investigation is apparently the cause for the shut down of a number of web sites this week for currently unknown reasons. The New York Times (via MSNBC.com) is reporting that the FBI raided a location in Reston, Virginia on Tuesday morning where a web server operation owned by a company called DigitalOne was in place. Officially the FBI won"t comment on the reported raid. However a DigitalOne employee sent a note to its clients after the raid stating, " ... . In the night FBI has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them ..."
The same employee added that while the FBI was interested in just one of DigitalOne"s web site clients the raid removed servers that affected "tens of clients". Apparently "the agents took entire server racks", according to the article. It"s currently unclear when the servers and the interrupted web sites will be restored. While it"s not known what the object of the raid was, an unnamed government official that the FBI and other government agencies were investigating the LulzSec hacker group and any related groups. It"s possible that the location housed a hacker group"s servers.
One of the companies affected by the FBI"s raid is the Curbed Network which runs a network of blogs that cover various topics. The story states that Lockhart Steele, the head of the Curbed Network, told The New York Times that the company"s servers were not the target of the raid, saying, "Our servers happened to be in with some naughty servers."