Hostmedia Issues

Is anyone caught up in HostMedia's "Aqua Node" issues?

I have been following what seems like a major incident over the last few days, and their public story is changing to shift the blame onto customers.

I'm seeing where this goes before sharing the info I have.

Currently, their Service Status page says:

Affecting System - Dell Chassis Issues

13/07/2026 01:00 Last Updated 15/07/2026 14:53

AQUA NODE UPDATE: VPS customers that are impacted by the insecure OS's installed on their VPS's are being contacted by our technical teams to confirm permission to restore from available backups. Once restored our team will work with customers to secure their VPS's. Please note, it is down to customers to keep their VPS instances updated and secured but in this case we are happy to action the updates.

What is interesting, is that they have scrubbed the previous history of this alert. Earlier in the week, they were posting constant updates about "hardware faults", moving drives to alternative servers, and said:

UPDATE: Due to a hardware fault on the Aqua node we are needing to move the drives to an alternative server... This should also fully confirm this as a hardware fault as VNC access to the server is available and all data is there.

Looks like they might have accidentally left customer's VNC ports bound to 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 when they moved the node over...