Mr Viral
Interview How long can a cloud storage outage continue before customers finally give up the ghost? Management at Murena – /e/OS maker – must have wrestled with this at night, though they hope a fix is around the corner.
Murena founder and CEO Gaël Duval took the stage at the 2025 State of Open to push ethical mobile OSes and The Register caught up with him to ask the obvious question that customers no doubt want answered.
The outage began when the majority of murena.io services became unavailable on October 6, 2024. Some services, such as calendars, contacts, and email, have since been restored. However, the cloud drive has remained stubbornly offline.
Duval attributed the problems to architectural decisions taken when the service started that didn’t scale with demand, supply chain problems encountered when getting hold of new hardware, and the length of time taken to process the terabytes of customer data.
THE CEO told The Register that the outfit had approximately 120,000 open accounts, with 50,000 active in the last 30 days. All accounts have been affected by the storage outage.
He acknowledged users’ frustration and said, “You always have some angry people, but most of them are incredibly supportive … I think they believe in our mission and what we do. We have seen a lot of people who wanted to donate some money to help solve the situation.”
Murena’s site also notes the ongoing outage with a blunt message:
“Please know our file system is not working at the moment so you will not be able to enjoy your paid storage except for your mailbox. Proceeding with your subscription nonetheless would mean a lot to us.”
Displayed below this is the pricing tiers: prices start at €1.99 per month / €19.90 per year for 20GB and go up to €24.99 per month / €249.90 per year for 2TB of workspace storage.
According to Duval, Murena is aiming for February 12 as the date when things should be up and running again. “We will be moving to a totally new architecture by the end of this year, with a lot of redundancy, that will prevent the outage situation we had in the future.”
The Reg is often critical of large tech vendors which inflict outages on their customers, yet at four months and counting, Murena is among the longest running that we’ve heard of. And even if the business is an open source company with well-intended aims, it is charging for a service that customers can’t access.
Back at the 2025 State of Open
During his presentation, Duval warned about the rampant data slurping in modern operating systems. The /e/OS maker sells smartphones and tablets running a version of Android stripped of Google’s tracking and services, replacing them with open source alternatives. Murena has been at this for years – we took a look at a device in 2022 – offering privacy-focused devices through its store, including models from Fairphone and Pixel.
The de-Googling is thorough – no Google apps or tracking services come pre-installed. Instead, Murena offers open source alternatives and its App Lounge, which allows users to install third-party apps while displaying a privacy score based on factors like built-in trackers and requested permissions.
Given Murena’s strong stance against Google’s data collection, The Register asked Duval why the biz still sells Pixel devices.
“To be honest, this is good hardware for the price,” he said, before emphasizing that although Google may be behind the hardware, in terms of software, “there is nothing left of Google.”
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Murena isn’t alone in offering a de-Googled version of Android – alternatives like GrapheneOS and CalyxOS take different approaches to privacy. Duval noted that if a user pokes deep into Android settings, it is possible to limit data collection. However, the point of Murena’s devices is to make this as easy as possible for users, he said, hence /e/OS, the App Lounge, and a relatively painless user experience.
The Reg asked if curbing the excessive data collection practices of Google and other tech vendors is something more suited to regulators. After all, the data collection practices of big tech have come under scrutiny by lawmakers worldwide.
Duval worries that regulation tends to follow technology – by the time regulators come up with rules, it might already be too late. He said that most people involved with regulation are lawyers without a technical background.
“They are not engineers. So actually, they rely on us to explain to them how it works so they can understand and possibly adapt the regulation.
“So regulation is needed, but probably it’s not enough. We have to make some products that are in advance from the regulation laws.”
AI without the privacy nightmare? Not so fast
Duval then shifted to the challenges of building a privacy-friendly generative AI service. Running a large language model (LLM) directly on a device would solve many privacy concerns, he noted, but current hardware struggles to handle the workload efficiently.
Cloud storage outage: Light at the end of the tunnel?
However, using a service running in the cloud has its own issues, particularly if context is to be kept. Duval said, “If we want to have some context that remains, it’s a complicated case for privacy.”
Still, it would be a stopgap until the device hardware sold by the /e/OS maker gets sufficiently powerful to permit the models to run locally.
He said, “We want to introduce something this year, but it’s going to be on a voluntary basis.
“Users will have to opt in.” ®
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