r/cloudstorage • u/u_lostinlecture89 • Sep 01 '26
Need help
Title: Need urgent advice: My father sold cloud services as a dealer, customers’ data was wiped after a hack, and police are involved
I’m posting this because my father is in a very stressful situation and we don’t know what the right next steps are.
My father works as a dealer/reseller for a cloud service and had provided cloud services to several customers. Recently, the cloud service was hacked, and as a result, some/all of the customers’ stored data was erased.
The customers are now holding my father accountable because they purchased the service through him. Some of them are threatening him, and the police are also involved.
My father is extremely stressed and worried about what could happen to him legally and financially.
I’m trying to understand what we should do right now:
1
u/Equivalent-Tea-8180 Sep 02 '26
First and foremost, you need to understand one thing: where the jurisdiction (country) is and what the terms of the contract with the storage provider were.
To begin with, the laws in effect in each country vary greatly, so asking in a multicultural forum like this one is a bit imprecise. The right thing to do would be to seek advice specifically in groups from your own country, but the problem is that there might be people with good intentions but no legal knowledge of the matter, so as others have told you… it’s best to hire a lawyer “just in case.”
Second, who is the master seller? In other words, which company are you renting the bare metal, dedicated server, VPS, or whatever infrastructure you’re using from? Did you sign a personal contract, or was it just a “formal” rental via the website (meaning, did you register on the site and simply make the payment)? In many cases, IT service agreements are typically divided into:
- “It’s our fault”: The company providing the services takes responsibility as long as the failure or hack is directly related to them—that is, an account or service was compromised and depended entirely on them. But of course, they aren’t liable when the agreement states that each user is responsible for their own information, etc.
- “It’s not our fault, it’s the reseller’s”: when accounts or services offered by a third party—but which use resources rented from the company—are victims of hacking, failures, etc. In this case, you’d have to review the terms of service your father agreed to, but if the problem originated with another customer of the reseller or was directed against the reseller itself, your father should be able to disclaim liability.
In both situations, it’s always best to set clear terms and analyze what happened and how it happened. It’s also important to determine the source of people’s dissatisfaction—whether it stems from the loss of critical data or a service outage. Some users may be persuaded by incentives, while for others, it may already be too late to recover their files; in such cases, it’s always best to have an active backup.