Nine PBS, the St. Louis-based PBS member station, is embroiled in a lawsuit to regain access to about 50 terabytes of archived historical footage spanning over 70 years. The footage includes significant events such as the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Great Flood of 1993. The dispute arose after Open Source Storage (OSS), the cloud storage provider contracted by Nine PBS, abruptly ceased operations in early March 2026 without warning, cutting off the station's access to its digital archives.

The archived data, originally stored by OSS and housed physically by Iron Mountain, is now inaccessible because Iron Mountain refuses to release the contents directly to Nine PBS, citing OSS's ownership of the servers. Despite a judge ruling during an August 2026 preliminary hearing that iron Mountain must provide physical access to the data storage devices, the retrieval process is complicated. Iron Mountain insists it acted responsibly and has been transparent in trying to resolve the issue, but recovery efforts remain challenged by the need to protect data belonging to other customers.

Nine PBS had been contracting with OSS and its predecessor since 2019, renewing the agreement annually. However, when the station attempted to renew its contract in February 2026, OSS did not respond, and the company soon disappeared from business registries, leaving Nine PBS unable to access or retrieve its data within the agreed 30-day window after contract termination. Feeling cornered, Nine PBS filed the lawsuit on July 28, 2026, to reclaim their valuable content, which the station asserts is rightfully theirs and of immense historical importance to the St. Louis community.

Following the legal ruling, Nine PBS is allowed to retrieve the physical servers from Iron Mountain and engage a third party, potentially a former OSS employee, to assist in data recovery under strict conditions that protect other clients' data integrity. Both Nine PBS and Iron Mountain must provide updates on this process by September 14, 2026. This case highlights the risks organizations face with cloud storage providers disappearing suddenly, raising broader concerns about digital archive security.