5 biggest file hosting shutdowns in history

There is a particular kind of dread that sets in when you type a familiar URL into your browser and see something you have never seen before, e.g., a blank page, a domain-for-sale notice, or worse, a government seizure banner. For millions of people around the world, that moment wasn't hypothetical. It happened on a random Tuesday morning when they went to retrieve a file they trusted to the cloud, only to find it gone. Permanently.

Cloud storage and file sharing have become essential parts of digital life, from personal backups to collaborative business workflows. Like a vault, it feels solid and permanent, but the truth is that every file hosting service is a business first, and sometimes businesses are not permamnent.

They get seized, acquired, pivoted, or simply run out of money. When that happens, your vacation photos, your work contracts, your entire creative archive, all of it goes with them.

This article walks through five of the most consequential file hosting shutdowns in internet history.

1. Amazon Drive (2011- 2023)

Amazon Drive launched in March 2011 as Amazon Cloud Drive to serve as a branded cloud storage service built to compete directly with Dropbox and Google Drive. The premise was simple and familiar: upload your files, access them anywhere, store what matters. It came bundled with Amazon Prime membership, giving hundreds of millions of users 5 GB of free storage alongside the streaming and shopping perks they were already paying for.

For over a decade, Amazon Drive was exactly the kind of service that felt permanent by association. Amazon, after all, runs the cloud infrastructure that a significant percentage of the internet runs on. They operate AWS and have data centres on every continent. The idea that Amazon would shut down a basic consumer file storage product, especially something as fundamental as a cloud drive, felt, as one tech writer put it at the time of the announcement, "rather unprecedented for a company to shut down something as basic as cloud storage in this day and age.”

So what happened?

On July 29, 2022, Amazon sent an email to Amazon Drive customers informing them that the service would be shut down. The announcement was brief and businesslike. "Over the last 11 years, Amazon Drive has served as a secure cloud storage service for Amazon customers to back up their files. On December 31, 2023, we will no longer support Amazon Drive to more fully focus on our efforts on photos and video storage with Amazon Photos."

That was the sum of the explanation. Eleven years of service, discontinued in a paragraph, with 17 months' notice.

The fundamental problem with long notice periods is that they breed procrastination in the same proportion as they breed relief. Users who received the July 2022 email, breathed a sigh of relief at the 2023 deadline, and filed it away mentally as "something to deal with eventually" were the ones who found themselves scrambling, or missing the window entirely. Unlike services that give 30 days and create genuine urgency, 17 months gives users every opportunity to reasonably postpone action until suddenly there's very little time left.

2. Adobe Creative Cloud Synced Files (2024–2025)

Adobe Creative Cloud Synced Files was not a standalone product. It was a feature which served as a cloud synchronization engine built into a subscription that designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other creative professionals were already paying between $55 and $60 per month to access.

The Creative Cloud Files folder appeared on your computer when you installed any Adobe application. It worked like Dropbox: files you put in that folder were automatically synced to Adobe's cloud storage and accessible across all your devices, on the Creative Cloud website, and shareable with other users by sending a link.

Why it shut down

In August 2023, Adobe sent emails to Creative Cloud subscribers informing them that Creative Cloud Synced Files would be discontinued. The announcement had its own bureaucratic complexity: the timeline varied by account type, which itself added to user confusion.

For personal Creative Cloud accounts, discontinuation was set for February 1, 2024, which was approximately five months from the announcement. Adobe later extended this deadline for some accounts through February 3, 2025.

For business accounts (Creative Cloud for Teams and Creative Cloud for Enterprise), discontinuation was originally set for October 1, 2024, also later extended through February 3, 2025. Starting December 11, 2023, new users could no longer access Creative Cloud Synced Files at all. The feature was frozen for new entrants immediately, months before the cutoffs for existing users.

3. Mega Upload (2005 - 2012)

At its peak, it was the 13th most-visited website on the entire internet. Founded in 2005 by Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz), the Hong Kong-based file hosting service claimed 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors by 2012. At one point, it was responsible for approximately 4% of all internet traffic worldwide. Users uploaded everything from movies to music, software, personal documents, business files, and backups.

The platform was one of the first services to pay users for generating traffic to their uploaded content, which made it enormously popular with content creators and, unfortunately, with copyright infringers too.

What happened to Mega Upload

On January 19, 2012, in one of the most dramatic law enforcement operations in the history of the internet, the U.S. Department of Justice, in coordination with the FBI, Europol, and police forces in New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Germany, simultaneously seized MegaUpload's domains, arrested Kim Dotcom and three associates at his Auckland mansion, and shut down the entire operation.

The indictment alleged that MegaUpload had cost copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue and that the site had generated $175 million in revenue through advertising and premium subscriptions. The DOJ called it "one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States."

Within hours of the seizure, the servers went dark. No warning. No grace period. No download window.

Users automatically lost access to all files stored on Megaupload overnight, including legitimate backups, family photos, business documents, and much more.

Kyle Goodwin, an Ohio-based sports videographer, became the public face of legitimate MegaUpload users who lost their content. He had stored his entire video business archive on MegaUpload and lost access to everything. His attorneys filed a motion with the courts, arguing that users like him had legal property rights in their stored content and deserved a mechanism for retrieval.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) intervened on behalf of legitimate users. After years of legal wrangling, Carpathia Hosting (which had been storing the seized servers) indicated the stored data amounted to approximately 28 petabytes, which is roughly about 28 million gigabytes of files spread across more than 1,000 servers.

Here is the brutal part: no meaningful data retrieval mechanism was ever established. The legal proceedings between the DOJ and Kim Dotcom have dragged on for over a decade. As of this writing, the criminal case has still not been fully resolved. In that time, Carpathia eventually sold its assets, and the servers were ultimately wiped or decommissioned.

4. Copy.com (2016)

Unlike a law enforcement shutdown, Copy.com’s closure was a business decision. Owned by Barracuda Networks, the cloud storage and syncing service announced in early 2016 that **it would discontinue Copy and its partner service CudaDrive as of May 1, 2016**, so that resources could be reallocated within the company.

This is what happened

On April 1, 2016, Barracuda Networks sent users an email announcing that Copy.com would be shut down on May 1, 2016, giving users exactly 30 days to migrate their data. Barracuda cited a need to "focus efforts on core Barracuda products" and concentrate resources on its enterprise security and networking business.

The consumer cloud storage market had, by 2016, consolidated heavily around Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Amazon. Competing as a smaller player was expensive and increasingly futile. For Barracuda, Copy.com was a distraction from their core business, and so they shut it down.

Although copy.com gave 30 days of notice, which sounds reasonable, but is genuinely tight when you consider the practical reality. Users who hadn't checked their email in a few weeks missed the window entirely. Others were in the middle of projects, travel, or life circumstances that made a rapid data migration difficult.

The service had attracted a number of small businesses and freelancers who had organised significant portions of their workflow around it, which included shared project folders, client file repositories, and collaborative document storage. For these users, 30 days to audit and migrate a multi-year archive of files was stressful at best.

5. Megashares / Drop.io (2010)

Before we all got comfortable with the idea of cloud storage, Drop.io was doing something truly amazing. Founded in 2008, Drop.io was a file-sharing service that let users create "drops", which were private, URL-accessible spaces where you could share files, audio, and video without requiring the people you shared with to create an account. It was clean, thoughtful, and genuinely useful for sharing files across different operating systems and devices.

By 2010, the platform had over 3 million registered users and was considered one of the more polished file-sharing products on the market.

What Happened

In October 2010, Facebook acquired Drop.io. Not for the product but for the team. In Silicon Valley parlance, this is called an "acqui-hire": a large company buys a startup primarily to bring its engineers and designers on board, with no intention of maintaining the acquired product.

Drop.io's founder, Sam Lessin, joined Facebook and the product was given until December 15, 2010, approximately six weeks, to wind down.

Six weeks might sound like a long time, but it included the Thanksgiving holiday, end-of-year business deadlines, and the reality that many users simply didn't notice the shutdown announcement amid the noise of daily email.

Drop.io served a particular niche of users who relied on it for quick, temporary file sharing without account requirements. Many of those users had not registered and therefore received no email notification. They simply found that their drop URLs stopped working one day.

To worsen the situation, all data stored on Copy.com was scheduled to be deleted automatically after the shutdown date.

Conclusion

If you are wondering whether the service you currently use is stable, run through these questions.

1. Is cloud storage their primary revenue-generating product, or a secondary feature of a larger offering?

2. When did they last update their blog, release notes, or public communications?

3. Have there been recent executive departures, layoffs, or negative press coverage?

4. Does the service offer a straightforward, frictionless way to export all of your data?

5. What do their Terms of Service say about notice periods for service termination?

There's no service that scores perfectly on all of these questions. But a service that fails multiple tests warrants either a backup strategy or a migration plan.