On September 1st, 2021, our firm filed an application to be authorized to bring a class action against Web Hosting Canada. This application seeks to obtain a compensation for Web Hosting Canada’s clients who were affected by the outage occurred on August 28th, 2021.
Our client’s story
Our client, OXIA Studio, is a company specializing in web design. They chose to host numerous websites that they designed for themselves, as well as for their clients, on Web Hosting Canada, because of their promise to provide a stable hosting environment with daily and automatic backups as well as free restorations of backups.
screenshots from whc.ca
However, on August 28th, 2021, our client was informed by one of their clients that her website was offline. Our client found out after speaking to Web Hosting Canada’s technical support that they had a major outage on their servers, where many of their websites were hosted.
Our client found out later in the day that out of Web Hosting Canada’s 12 servers, 5 of them, among them the Drummond server that hosted 5 of their websites, including their own website, oxia.ca, reported serious data loss.
On the following day, our client found out the extent of damage: the local storage and external backup storage on the 5 servers that were the most seriously impacted were heavily damaged, with only a slight probability of restoring the data with success.
It was only on August 30th, 2021, that Web Hosting Canada finally disclosed the reason of the outage: an individual from a third-party service provider used their privileged account access to connect to one of their datacenter’s management portals and initiated server reimaging on some of their servers, without authorization.
Not only did our client suffered damages because their website was down since August 28th, 2021, they are forced to proceed to rebuild the 5 websites on the Drummond server that could not be restored, at a cost of $ 25 500, plus taxes.
The fault
We claim that not only did Web Hosting Canada fail to ensure the availability of web hosting servers to their clients, they also failed to put in place sufficient security measures to protect their clients’ data.
Under the web hosting contract, Web Hosting Canada has an obligation to ensure fulfillment of the offered service and to ensure their clients’ data backup.
Proposed class
Class
All persons who are clients of the defendant and who had accounts on the servers that were impacted by the outage occurred on August 28th, 2021;
Subclass A
All persons who are clients of the defendant and who had accounts on the servers that were impacted by the outage occurred on August 28th, 2021 which are unrecoverable (Clark, Drummond, Acadie, Bernard, Bishop);
Subclass B
All persons who are clients of the defendant and who had accounts on the servers that were impacted by the outage occurred on August 28th, 2021 for which the backups were restored (Beaubien, Peel, Rachel, Atwater, Decarie, Rev et Rev2;);
Applications filed to the Court
Application to be authorized to bring a class action (French)
Current state of the case
On November 28th, 2023, the court approved the settlement agreement.
To read the judgment, click here (French).
To read the settlement agreement, click here.
To read the notice to members, click here.
Click here for the claim form.
More news
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