I previously commented on this when a different, earlier news article and it wasn't clear at the time if the storage company was a colocation customer, or a dedicated server customer of Iron Mountain:
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(from 4 days ago)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293326
The news article is really not clear about whether this was, relative to the company "OSS":
a) OSS is a colocation customer with its own hardware colocating it inside an Iron Mountain datacenter. In which OSS owned the bare metal and paid iron mountain for rack space and power.
or
b) OSS is a dedicated hardware customer of Iron Mountain running a service on bare metal owned by Iron Mountain, and has gone defunct, leaving behind a bunch of servers/storage arrays that would in normal circumstances get wiped/reprovisioned.
From the point of view of a customer of OSS (PBS), that's two extremely different things.
If it's scenario A, I don't see how PBS has any claim against Iron Mountain. Your typical datacenter colo host for bare metal hardware owned by a customer has no involvement whatsoever in the condition or operation of the data, operating system, filesystems, RAID arrays, ZFS, etc of how the customer has set up their environment. Nor any ability to do anything with it. A colocation host that hasn't been paid for its rack space and power will typically have clauses in its colo contracts allowing for seizure and sale of abandoned hardware after a certain period of time.
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New commentary:
The new news article seems to shed a bit more light on it, it sounds like it's scenario B, in which OSS never owned the hardware (they just set up the operating system/software config on it), and was renting it from Iron Mountain. In this scenario it's much more realistic to expect to be able to get some data back. And as the new news article says, PBS is paying all of the overdue bills in order to be able to do so.
Ordinarily a dedicated server provider that is renting rackmount bare metal hardware to people has a very automated and fast re-provisioning process, if you don't pay your bill, the terms of the contract let them wipe the servers within a fairly short amount of time and reallocat them to new customers.
Now if it had been scenario A, I think that there would have been very little opportunity for judicial remedy in an order requiring Iron Mountain to do anything, because Iron Mountain would have had no control over what a failing/bankrupt/dead colocation customer did with the data on their servers. PBS might have had a claim against the principals of the OSS company, but then you get into the "blood from a stone" problem of trying to enforce a judgment against people who have no assets or ability to pay.
For some reason, despite these things being rather simple and concrete distinctions, all the reporting around the case keeps being confusing, vague, and contradictory. I had been rather convinced by the Ars Technica article [1] that Iron Mountain was just the data center operator and this was colocation of completely OSS-owned and managed equipment. Iron Mountain's statements there certainly seem to say that. There's the complexity here that, in general, Iron Mountain does apparently provide both data storage, and colocation.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-s...
Part of the problem would be that we have "tech" journalists writing this who have never been on either side of the transaction directly as a colocation customer, or an ISP/datacenter/hosting company, and drafted/reviewed contracts for such services. Nor have they ever gone and like, personally laid hands on a 2U rackmount server in a cabinet in a colo.
I'm not sure that I could reasonably expect a "journalist" to have those qualifications, but they could at least attempt to interview a neutral third party in the colo industry who can explain the distinction.