Western Digital's (WD) My Cloud Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, such as the WD MyBook World Live, WD My Cloud EX1, EX2, and EX4 sounded like a good idea. They give you terabytes of local storage and remote access to your drives via the WD2Go service. And it is a good idea, when it works. Since March 26, 2014, however, for many users the service has failed more often then it's worked .

There were even earlier reports of problems with the WD2Go service. WD's customers are not happy. They've been trying numerous fixes, including clearing their Web browser's cache, deleting all WD-related cookies, and trying different browsers to reach their drives' storage remotely. Sometimes, it works, sometimes it doesn't, and there's nothing more annoying to a user than a service that works erratically.

As one discontented user wrote, "Fail. Fail. Fail. Never again a WD product."

Before the weekend, WD was stating that they were "continuing to make progress restoring connections to our My Cloud and My Book Live servers, but some users continue to experience intermittent connectivity and transfer speed issues. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and we are working very hard to resolve these issues and resume normal service for everyone as soon as possible. We thank you for your patience."

Indeed, on Friday, April 4, WD claimed that "Most My Cloud and My Book Live device owners are now connected. If you do not have a remote connection to your device, please reboot it — but only if you do not have a remote connection."

At the same time, WD admitted that a related remote access service, MioNet, was still failing. "We are making progress in restoring access to the authentication servers and expect to start restoring MioNet services on Monday April 7. Thank you for your patience." Patience, however, is something that WD's customers were running out of.

By Sunday, April 6, the problems were still happening. In a public letter, WD president Jim Murphy’s apologized saying, "At WD, our commitment to you is reliable, secure, and easily accessible storage for your most valuable content. This past week you may have experienced a service disruption for our personal cloud products. If you have been directly affected by this, I want to extend my personal, sincerest apology."

Murphy continued, "Your feedback to us has been invaluable. All of us at WD are committed to minimizing downtime and ensuring the service information we provide is valuable and frequent. We already have implemented important changes to our infrastructure and network capability. While we have validated the vast majority of your remote connections, we continue our focus on providing uninterrupted access from your phone, tablet, or computer. Your content deserves nothing less."

That's all very nice, but the service is still failing and WD has not supplied further information on the root cause of the problem. Murphy encouraged users to go to the main WD Website for "more information about our personal cloud service restoration," but I was unable to find any more answers to the problem.

For now, at least, WD My Cloud users can only grit their teeth and hope that someday soon they'll be able to access their storage remotely. I wouldn't hold my breath for when the service will be fully restored.

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