Public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center after its cloud storage vendor goes out of business, losing over 70 years of archival materials and programming

Nine PBS in St.

Louis sues to recover roughly 50 terabytes of archive spanning seven decades after cloud vendor Open Source Storage went defunct and cut off access on the day its contract expired Iron Mountain says it never had access to the data, arguing it rents physical space to OSS and that handing over a third party's hardware would have breached its contracts and exposed other clients' data A Denver judge has since ruled that Nine PBS owns the material and ordered cooperation on retrieval within 30 days Nine PBS, the public television station in St.

Louis, has sued Iron Mountain Data Centers in Denver District Court, seeking the return of roughly 50 terabytes of archival material sitting in a Denver facility.

This move was necessitated by its contracted cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), which quietly went defunct earlier in 2026.

The legal brief has since prompted District Court Judge Eric Elliff to rule that Nine PBS is the rightful owner of the materials and is entitled to recover them, and to order Iron Mountain to cooperate in every way it can with the retrieval.

How did a station lose its own archive of data? Nine PBS's relationship with what it calls the predecessor of Open Source Storage began in 2019, when it entered into a contract with the latter to supply hardware, software, and cloud storage services for the station's archival materials.

The contract was renewed annually, first with its predecessor and then with OSS itself, until recently, when it tried to arrange a meeting to renew the contract for 2026.

OSS did not respond, nor did it indicate any intention to end the arrangement.

The agreement was due to expire on March 6th, and the contract essentially allowed PBS an additional 30 days to retrieve its data after termination.

However, when access was cut off, PBS received no response or path to access its data.

Instead, when looking for an explanation, it found out that the OSS website no longer existed and that the company had a delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State.

Further digging helped the TV station find a link to Iron Mountain, and on March 13, Nine PBS sent a demand letter asking the data center operator to preserve and return its material, offering to cover any reasonable costs incurred.

Iron Mountain neither confirmed nor denied that it held any of the material.

Nine PBS sued OSS and its president Charles Wells in St.